Top 100 Victor Hugo Quotes
#1. I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.
Victor Hugo
#2. This child whom we Love, Brings daylight Into our soul.
Victor Hugo
#3. We are drawn to what we lack. No one loves daylight more than a blind man.
Victor Hugo
#4. Men are still men. The despot's wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power's excess,
Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs.
Victor Hugo
#5. Faith is necessary to men; woe to him who believes in nothing!
Victor Hugo
#6. Let misery hide itself in silence, otherwise it becomes treason.
Victor Hugo
#7. It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.
Victor Hugo
#8. The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous, - that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.
Victor Hugo
#9. In short, between men and women you want ... "
"Equality."
"Equality! You can't mean it. Man and woman are two different creatures."
"I said equality. I didn't say identity.
Victor Hugo
#10. Water! pretending to be pure, thou resemblest false friends. Thou art warm at the top and cold at bottom.
Victor Hugo
#11. We need those who pray constantly to compensate for those who do not pray at all.
Victor Hugo
#12. You shouldn't abuse the revolutionaries, Mother Streetcorner. My pistol is on your side. It's to help you find more things worth eating in your basket.
Victor Hugo
#13. Nature at times adds her own commentary to our actions with a kind of somber and considered eloquence, as though she were bidding us reflect.
Victor Hugo
#14. I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
Victor Hugo
#15. It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-sufficient we think it! How, being in possession of the false aim of life, happiness, we forget the true aim, duty!
Victor Hugo
#16. The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real
Victor Hugo
#17. He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.
Victor Hugo
#18. It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
Victor Hugo
#19. the phantom of social justice tormented him.
Victor Hugo
#20. This humble soul loved, and that was all.
Victor Hugo
#21. To sacrifice the world to paradise is to let slip the prey for the shadow.
Victor Hugo
#22. First I loved women, then animals, and now I love stones. They're just as amusing as women and animals and they're much less trecherous.
Victor Hugo
#23. All that he might have felt of love in his entire life melted into a sort of ineffable radiance.
Victor Hugo
#24. In the presence of ... civil war, to testify to humanity! ... to prove that above royalties, above revolutions, above earthly questions, there is the immense emotion of the human soul!
Victor Hugo
#25. Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled
Victor Hugo
#26. Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.
Victor Hugo
#27. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.
Victor Hugo
#28. ...There was a menagerie in which hideous clowns, dressed in rags and come from who knows where, were in 1823 exhibiting to the peasants of Montfermeil one of those hideous Brazilian vultures.
Victor Hugo
#29. There is one thing sadder than to see one's children die; it is to see them leading an evil life.
Victor Hugo
#30. Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and lyric.
Victor Hugo
#31. Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping.
Victor Hugo
#32. Sin as little as possible - that is the law of mankind. Not to sin at all is the dream of the angel. All earthly tings are subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.
Victor Hugo
#33. Dark Error's other hidden side is truth.
Victor Hugo
#35. When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud, happy, her heart full to overflowing. Jean
Victor Hugo
#36. He flew into a rage on every occasion, most frequently when wrong.
Victor Hugo
#37. Every idea must have a visible enfolding.
Victor Hugo
#38. I bear the dungeon within me; within me is winter, ice, and despair; I have darkness in my soul.
Victor Hugo
#39. The universe appeared to him like an immense malady; everywhere he felt fever, everywhere he heard the sound of suffering, and, without seeking to solve the enigma, he strove to dress the wound.
Victor Hugo
#40. The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in proportion as the fortress is the less menaced.
Victor Hugo
#41. The sunshine was delightful, the foliage gently astir, more from the activity of birds than from the breeze. One gallant little bird, doubtless lovelorn, was singing his heart out at the top of a tall tree.
Victor Hugo
#42. I dedicate this book to the rock of hospitality and liberty, to that portion of old Norman ground inhabited by the noble nation of the sea, to the island of Guernsey, severe yet kind, my present asylum, my probable tomb.
Victor Hugo
#43. Enjolras caught glimpses of a luminous uprising under the dark skirts of the future.
Victor Hugo
#44. If one could only get out of a grief as one gets out of a city!
Victor Hugo
#45. The secret associations, the schools, in the name of principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were approaching preparatory to dashing themselves together,
Victor Hugo
#46. Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a finger
that would suffice for my eternity!
Victor Hugo
#47. Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.
Victor Hugo
#48. This is a leviathan I am about to ship out to sea ...
Victor Hugo
#49. There is a spectacle greater than the sea, and that is the sky; there is a spectacle greater than the sky, and that is the human soul.
Victor Hugo
#50. There is a way of avoiding which resembles seeking.
Victor Hugo
#51. To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.
Victor Hugo
#52. You always have everything better than the rest, even pain.
Victor Hugo
#53. Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
Victor Hugo
#54. The tomb is not a blind alley: it is a thoroughfare. It closes on the twilight. It opens on the dawn.
Victor Hugo
#55. The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have vanished contains neither thought nor love.
Victor Hugo
#56. What billows are ideas! How quickly they cover all that it is their mission to destroy and to bury, and how promptly they create frightful gulfs!
Victor Hugo
#57. The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.
Victor Hugo
#58. Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.
Victor Hugo
#59. It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.
Victor Hugo
#60. A hundred francs," thought Fantine. "But in what trade can one earn a hundred sous a day?" "Come!" said she, "let us sell what is left." The unfortunate girl became a woman of the town.
Victor Hugo
#61. A house is built of logs and stone, of tiles and posts and piers; a home is built of loving deeds that stand a thousand years.
Victor Hugo
#62. Another said , I don't ask six months, I don't ask two. In less than two weeks we'll meet the government face to face. With twenty-five thousand men we can make our stand.
Victor Hugo
#63. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.
Victor Hugo
#64. Everything Changes. The only thing that remains immovable across the centuries and fixes the character of a people is cooking.
Victor Hugo
#65. He was not to perceive that of two men engaged in an action so hideous, he who permits the thing is worse than the man who does the work, because he is the coward!
Victor Hugo
#66. He felt that to increase his knowledge was to strengthen his hatred. Under certain circumstances, instruction and enlightenment may serve as rallying points for evil.
Victor Hugo
#67. As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless
Victor Hugo
#68. To subdue matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the second.
Victor Hugo
#69. Night and the day, when united,
Bring forth the beautiful light.
Victor Hugo
#70. The poetic element lying hidden in most women is the source of their magnetic attraction.
Victor Hugo
#71. Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do.
Victor Hugo
#72. Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.
Victor Hugo
#73. 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
#74. Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
Victor Hugo
#75. It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.
Victor Hugo
#76. When, like an Emir of tyrannic power,
Sirius appears, and on the horizon black
Bids countless stars pursue their mighty track.
Victor Hugo
#78. Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
Victor Hugo
#79. Love is the salutation of the angel to the stars
Victor Hugo
#80. This man accepted everything, excused everything, forgave everything, blessed everything, welcomed everything, and asked of Providence, of men, of justice, of society, of nature, of the world, one thing only - that Cosette love him!
Victor Hugo
#81. Logic ignores the almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.
Victor Hugo
#82. Invading armies can be resisted, invading ideas cannot be.
Victor Hugo
#83. Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. 'The Spirit is a garden,' said he
Victor Hugo
#84. Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.
Victor Hugo
#85. To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth
Victor Hugo
#86. As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.
Victor Hugo
#88. There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor Hugo
#89. A wretched woman is more unfortunate than a wretched man, because she is an instrument of pleasure.
Victor Hugo
#90. Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood.
Victor Hugo
#91. To fall into it again in appearance was to leave it behind in reality! He had to do it! He would have done nothing if he didn't do that! His whole life would have been useless, all his penitence wasted, and there would be only one thing left to say: What is the point?
Victor Hugo
#92. I encountered in the street a penniless young man who was in love. His hat was old and his jacket worn, with holes at the elbows; water soaked through his shoes, but starlight flooded through his soul.
Victor Hugo
#93. Be a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.
Victor Hugo
#94. He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.
Victor Hugo
#95. People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.
Victor Hugo
#96. First of all, I wish you love, and that by loving you may also be loved.
But if it's not like that, be brief in forgetting
And after you've forgotten, don't keep anything.
Victor Hugo
#97. He was not his father, and this was not his work; but he was the master, and this was his masterpiece.
Victor Hugo
#98. Every man who has in his soul a secret feeling of revolt against any act of the State, of life, or of destiny, is on the verge of riot; and so soon as it appears, he begins to quiver, and to feel himself borne away by the whirlwind.
Victor Hugo
#99. Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as this face, wherein was displayed all that may be designated as the evil of the good.
Victor Hugo
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