Victor Hugo Quotes

Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.

Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls.

All men are alike in their lower natures; it is in their higher characters that they differ.

You can change the circumstances but you can never change man's inner nature.

I have a deep fascination with human nature, with all its virtues and all its defects.

I think the word 'soul' - it depends on what you define by 'soul.' If you're defining it as a mystical aura that is outside the body, I cannot measure that. If you're talking about soul as human nature, the rank of spectrum of behaviors and reactions that we know humans produce under certain circumstances, that is measurable.

Because I grew up in Africa, I always see people and try to understand characters as what kind of animal they'd be.

Of all the animals which fly in the air, walk on the land, or swim in the sea, from Paris to Peru, from Japan to Rome, the most foolish animal in my opinion is man.

You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society. Of course, I'm not saying that you can derive moral rules from nature - that's deriving an ought from an is, as the philosophers say - but you do need to know what kind of animals we are if you want to design a stable society.

History teaches us virtue, but nature never ceases to teachh us vice.

There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise.

Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

The human face does not always reflect the beauty that may repose in the soul.

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

Success does not implant bad characteristics in people. It merely steps up the growth rate of the bad characteristics they already had.

Human nature will find itself only when it fully realizes that to be human it has to cease to be beastly or brutal.

Man is a thinking animal, a talking animal, a toolmaking animal, a building animal, a political animal, a fantasizing animal. But, in the twilight of a civilization he is chiefly a taxpaying animal.

It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species.

My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.