Skip to content

Reason is intelligence taking exercise; imagination is intelligence with an erection.

— Victor Hugo

La raison, c'est l'intelligence en exercice; l'imagination c'est l'intelligence en érection

Original text (French)

Another quote →

Notes from Wikiquote

Unpublished notebook from 1845-50. Published in Seebacher (ed.), Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 10, p. 158 (Laffont, 1989). English translation from Robb, Victor Hugo p. 249 (Norton, 1997).

Topics

Imagination

More quotes by Victor Hugo

Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of grief!

Les Misérables (1862)

One can no more pray too much than love too much.

Les Misérables (1862)

The best way to worship God is to love your wife.

Les Misérables (1862)

To love or to have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life. To love is a consummation.

Les Misérables (1862)

To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.

Ninety-Three (1874)

All Victor Hugo quotes →

You may also like

Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me.

L. Frank Baum Introduction to The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)

There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.

Alan Moore

An active imagination may find a bad tendency arising out of every transaction between imperfect morals.

Edward Hall Alderson Brownlow v. Egerton (1854)

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Victor Hugo (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.