Victor Hugo
politician, playwright, novelist, draftsperson, librettist, essayist, memoirist, writer, illustrator, travel writer, poet, art historian, opinion journalist, graphic artist, author
Read on Wikipedia1802 – 1885
All Quotes by Victor Hugo
“Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.”
“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
“The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.”
“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.”
“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”
“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
“Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.”
“Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.”
“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.”
“When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.”
“Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.”
“Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.”
“Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.”
“My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.”
“Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.”
“I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.”
“The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.”
“It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.”
“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
“Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.”
“Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.”
“Those who live are those who fight.”
“Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.”
“It is by suffering that human beings become angels.”
“Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.”
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”
“The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.”
“Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.”
“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. God is awake.”
“Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.”
“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.”
“It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.”
“What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!”
“The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.”
“Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.”
“Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.”
“Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.”
“The flesh is the surface of the unknown.”
“A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.”
“Love that is not jealous is neither true nor pure.”
“No one can keep a secret better than a child.”
“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.”
“What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.”
“There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature.”
“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.”
“My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.”
“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.”
“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.”
“To love is to act.”
“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.”
“Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.”
“The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.”
“To love beauty is to see light.”
“Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.”
“Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.”
“One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.”
“Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.”
“To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.”
“One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.”
“Despotism is a long crime.”
“Well, listen a moment, Monsieur Mayor; I have often been severe in my life towards others. It was just. I did right. Now if I were not severe towards myself, all I have justly done would become injustice. Should I spare myself more than others? No. What! if I should be prompt only to punish others and not myself, I should be a wretched indeed! - Javert to M. Madeleine”
“It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.”
“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.”
“Love, in the eyes of the world, is either a carnal appetite or a vague fancy, which possession extinguishes or absence destroys. That is why it is commonly said, with a strange abuse of words, that passion does not endure.”
“A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.”
“A library implies an act of faith.”
“Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.”
“Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.”
“Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.”
“Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.”
“What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.”
“The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.”
“When liberty returns, I will return.”
“Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.”
“Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?”
“No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.”
“Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.”
“Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.”
“Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.”
“Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.”
“To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.”
“Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.”
“The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.”
“Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.”
“A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.”
“Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.”
“In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.”
“It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.”
“Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.”
“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
“I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.”
“Toleration is the best religion.”
“I'm religiously opposed to religion.”
“One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'”
“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.”
“Many great actions are committed in small struggles.”
“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.”
“As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.”
“To contemplate is to look at shadows.”
“A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.”
“The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.”
“One believes others will do what he will do to himself.”
“The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.”
“He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.”
“Genius: the superhuman in man.”
“Taste is the common sense of genius.”
“I see black light (his last words)”
“Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.”
“Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.”
“I would have liked to be - indeed, I should have been - a second Rembrandt.”
“Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.”
“Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.”
“I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!”
“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.”
“Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!”
“As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.”
“Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.”
“Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.”
“What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.”
“We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.”
“Wisdom is a sacred communion.”
“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.”
“This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.”
“Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.”
“The ox suffers, the cart complains.”
“Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.”
“Those who do not weep, do not see.”
“Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.”
“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.”
“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.”
“Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.”
“A great artist is a great man in a great child.”
“Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.”
“The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.”
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.”
“The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.”
“When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.”
“Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.”
“He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.”
“Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.”
“Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.”
“To think of shadows is a serious thing.”
“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.”
“She let her head fall back upon Marius' knees and her eyelids closed. He thought that poor soul had gone. Eponine lay motionless; but just when Marius supposed her for ever asleep, she slowly opened her eyes in which the gloomy deepness of death appeared, and said to him with an accent the sweetness on which already seemed to come from another world:”
“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
“There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.”
“Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.”
“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.”
“Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.”
“He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.”
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”
“To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.”
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
“Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.”
“Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.”
“The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.”
“What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.”
“Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.”
“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.”
“Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.”
“When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.”
“Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.”
“Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.”
“The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.”
“Life's great happiness is to be convinced we are loved.”
“Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.”
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”
“There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.”
“To love beauty is to see light.”
“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
“Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.”
“When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.”
“The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.”
“A war between Europeans is a civil war.”
“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
“Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.”
“One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”
“Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
“A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.”
“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.”
“Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.”
“When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.”
“Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.”
“Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.”
“Stupidity talks, vanity acts.”
“A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.”
“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
“Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.”
“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”
“When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.”
“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”
“Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.”
“A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.”
“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
“Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.”
“Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.”
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
“Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.”
“Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.”
“Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.”
“There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
“To love beauty is to see light.”
“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”
“When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.”
“Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.”
“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”
“A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.”
“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”
“Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.”
“One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”
“Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.”
“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.”
“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
“He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.”
“Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.”
“An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.”
“Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.”
“The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.”
“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”
“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.”
“The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.”
“Liberation is not deliverance.”
“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.”
“Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.”
“The learned man knows that he is ignorant.”
“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”
“Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.”
“But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.”
“A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.”
“I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.”
“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.”
“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”
“Conscience is God present in man.”
“When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.”
“Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.”
“Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.”
“Liberation is not deliverance.”
“To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.”
“Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.”
“The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.”
“The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.”
“Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.”
“The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.”
“Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”
“A library implies an act of faith.”
“People do not lack strength; they lack will.”
“I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.”
“Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.”
“Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.”
“Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.”
“It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.”
“Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.”
“No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.”
“Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.”
“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.”
“Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.”
“Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.”
“Habit is the nursery of errors.”
“Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.”
“A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.”
“By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.”
“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”