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Quotes by Victor Hugo


Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
– Victor Hugo

More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
– Victor Hugo

Not being heard is no reason for silence.
– Victor Hugo
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
– Victor Hugo
A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
– Victor Hugo
A library implies an act of faith.
– Victor Hugo
A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement - in a word, with more renunciation than you care for - and so you flee the contagion.
– Victor Hugo
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
– Victor Hugo
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
– Victor Hugo
Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
– Victor Hugo
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
– Victor Hugo
At the shrine of friendship never say die, let the wine of friendship never run dry.
– Victor Hugo
Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.
– Victor Hugo
But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.
– Victor Hugo
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
– Victor Hugo
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
– Victor Hugo
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
– Victor Hugo
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
– Victor Hugo
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
– Victor Hugo
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
– Victor Hugo
Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.
– Victor Hugo
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
– Victor Hugo
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
– Victor Hugo
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
– Victor Hugo
Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
– Victor Hugo
Habit is the nursery of errors.
– Victor Hugo
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
– Victor Hugo
Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murders. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.
– Victor Hugo
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
– Victor Hugo
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
– Victor Hugo
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
– Victor Hugo
How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
– Victor Hugo
Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier.
– Victor Hugo
I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.
– Victor Hugo
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
– Victor Hugo
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
– Victor Hugo
Is there no hope? the sick man said, The silent doctor shook his head, And took his leave with signs of sorrow, Despairing of his fee to-morrow.
– Victor Hugo
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
– Victor Hugo
It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.
– Victor Hugo
Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
– Victor Hugo
Liberation is not deliverance.
– Victor Hugo
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
– Victor Hugo
Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
– Victor Hugo
Most commonly revolt is born of material circumstances; but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Revolt is Masaniello, who led the Neapolitan insurgents in 1647; but insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is a thing of the spirit, revolt is a thing of the stomach.
– Victor Hugo
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
– Victor Hugo
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
– Victor Hugo
Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
– Victor Hugo
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
– Victor Hugo
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
– Victor Hugo
One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.
– Victor Hugo
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
– Victor Hugo
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
– Victor Hugo
Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.
– Victor Hugo
The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
– Victor Hugo
The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.
– Victor Hugo
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.
– Victor Hugo
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
– Victor Hugo
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
– Victor Hugo
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
– Victor Hugo
There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.
– Victor Hugo
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
– Victor Hugo
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
– Victor Hugo
To love another person is to see the face of God.
– Victor Hugo
To love beauty is to see light.
– Victor Hugo
To think of shadows is a serious thing.
– Victor Hugo
Toleration is the best religion.
– Victor Hugo
Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.
– Victor Hugo
We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.
– Victor Hugo
When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.
– Victor Hugo
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
– Victor Hugo
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
– Victor Hugo
Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
– Victor Hugo
Wisdom is a sacred communion.
– Victor Hugo
You punch me, I punch back. I do not believe it's good for ones self-respect to be a punching bag.
– Victor Hugo
What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections of the soul? Man is a depth still greater than the people. Jean Valjean at that very moment was the prey of a terrible upheaval. Every sort of gulf had opened again within him. He also was trembling, like Paris, on the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution. A few hours had sufficed to bring this about. His destiny and his conscience had suddenly been covered with gloom. Of him also, as well as of Paris, it might have been said: Two principles are face to face. The white angel and the black angel are about to seize each other on the bridge of the abyss. Which of the two will hurl the other over? Who will carry the day?
– Victor Hugo
The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
– Victor Hugo
He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign.
– Victor Hugo
If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.
– Victor Hugo
Popularity? It is glory's small change.
– Victor Hugo
What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!
– Victor Hugo
Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.
– Victor Hugo
If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.
– Victor Hugo
To be a saint is the exception; to be upright is the rule. Err, falter, sin, but be upright. To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. Sin is a gravitation.
– Victor Hugo
There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.
– Victor Hugo
Nothing discernable to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidible, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
– Victor Hugo
There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood tomorrow.
– Victor Hugo
Do you know what friendship is... it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.
– Victor Hugo
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
– Victor Hugo
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
– Victor Hugo
What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.
– Victor Hugo
Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.
– Victor Hugo
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
– Victor Hugo
We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.
– Victor Hugo
To think is of itself to be useful it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.
– Victor Hugo
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
– Victor Hugo
To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.
– Victor Hugo
To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.
– Victor Hugo
There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
– Victor Hugo
The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.
– Victor Hugo
The three great problems of this century the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.
– Victor Hugo