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Victor Hugo
(26 Feb 1802 - 22 May 1885)
French novelist and poet.
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Science Quotes by Victor Hugo (19 quotes)
A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.
— Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo and Charles E. Wilbour (trans.), Les Misérables (1862), 41.
Algebra applies to the clouds.
— Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo and Charles E. Wilbour (trans.), Les Misérables (1862), 41.
An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted.
— Victor Hugo
Histoire d' un Crime (written 1851-52, published 1877), conclusion, chap. 10. Trans. T. H. Joyce and Arthur Locker (1886), 413.
Astronomy, that micography of heaven, is the most magnificent of the sciences. ... Astronomy has its clear side and its luminous side; on its clear side it is tinctured with algebra, on its luminous side with poetry.
— Victor Hugo
In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O'Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 237-8.
Because a fact seems strange to you, you conclude that it is not one. ... All science, however, commences by being strange. Science is successive. It goes from one wonder to another. It mounts by a ladder. The science of to-day would seem extravagant to the science of a former time. Ptolemy would believe Newton mad.
— Victor Hugo
In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O'Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 322.
Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates.
— Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo and Charles E. Wilbour (trans.), Les Misérables (1862), 41.
In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and winding, ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.
— Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo and Charles E. Wilbour (trans.), Les Misérables (1862), 41.
It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: “Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses.” Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.
[With a sincere heart, and of faith unfeigned, I deny by oath, condemn and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies.]
[With a sincere heart, and of faith unfeigned, I deny by oath, condemn and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies.]
— Victor Hugo
In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O'Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 313.
Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.
— Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo and Charles E. Wilbour (trans.), Les Misérables (1862), 41.
Out Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city.
— Victor Hugo
In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O'Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 243.
Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections... science is a ladder... poetry is a winged flight... An artistic masterpiece exists for all time... Dante does not efface Homer.
— Victor Hugo
Quoted in Pierre Biquard, Frederic Joliot-Curie: The Man and his Theories (1961), trans. Geoffrey Strachan (1965), 168.
Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.
— Victor Hugo
In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O'Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 237.
There is no supernatural, there is only nature. Nature alone exists and contains all. All is. There is the part of nature that we perceive, and the part of nature that we do not perceive. ... If you abandon these facts, beware; charlatans will light upon them, also the imbecile. There is no mean: science, or ignorance. If science does not want these facts, ignorance will take them up. You have refused to enlarge human intelligence, you augment human stupidity. When Laplace withdraws Cagliostro appears.
— Victor Hugo
In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O'Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 320.
To sum up all, let it be known that science and religion are two identical words. The learned do not suspect this, no more do the religious. These two words express the two sides of the same fact, which is the infinite. Religion—Science, this is the future of the human mind.
— Victor Hugo
In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O'Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 325.
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
— Victor Hugo
In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O'Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 380.
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?
— Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo and Charles E. Wilbour (trans.), Les Misérables (1862), 41.
Who then can calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?
— Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo and Charles E. Wilbour (trans.), Les Misérables (1862), 41.
Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?
— Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo and Charles E. Wilbour (trans.), Les Misérables (1862), 41.
[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity...
— Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo and Charles E. Wilbour (trans.), Les Misérables (1862), 41.
At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. -- Carl Sagan
