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Victor Hugo Quotes

Author & Poet
Born On
1802-02-26
Died On
1885-05-22
Birth Place
France
Death Place
Paris, France
Birth Sign
pisces
Father
Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo
Mother
Sophie Trébuchet
Spouse
Adèle Foucher
Nationality
French
Education
Lycée Louis-le-Grand

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

Victor Hugo

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

Victor Hugo

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.

Victor Hugo

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

Victor Hugo

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

Victor Hugo

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Victor Hugo

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.

Victor Hugo

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

Victor Hugo

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

Victor Hugo

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

To love beauty is to see light.

Victor Hugo

Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.

Victor Hugo

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

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

When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.

Victor Hugo

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

Victor Hugo

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

Victor Hugo

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.

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

To love another person is to see the face of God.

Victor Hugo

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Victor Hugo

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.

Victor Hugo

The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.

Victor Hugo

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

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

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

Victor Hugo

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Victor Hugo

The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.

Victor Hugo

The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.

Victor Hugo

Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.

Victor Hugo

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.

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

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

Victor Hugo

Habit is the nursery of errors.

Victor Hugo

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

Victor Hugo

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

Victor Hugo

There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Victor Hugo

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

Victor Hugo

Conscience is God present in man.

Victor Hugo

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

Victor Hugo

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

Victor Hugo

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Victor Hugo

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

Victor Hugo

Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.

Victor Hugo

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

Victor Hugo

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

Victor Hugo

Taste is the common sense of genius.

Victor Hugo

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

The flesh is the surface of the unknown.

Victor Hugo

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

Victor Hugo

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.

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

To love is to act.

Victor Hugo

It is by suffering that human beings become angels.

Victor Hugo

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

Victor Hugo

There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

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

Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.

Victor Hugo

Toleration is the best religion.

Victor Hugo

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

Victor Hugo

Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.

Victor Hugo

Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

Victor Hugo

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.

Victor Hugo

When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.

Victor Hugo

One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.

Victor Hugo

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.

Victor Hugo

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

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

Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

Victor Hugo

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

Victor Hugo

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

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

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

Victor Hugo

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

Victor Hugo

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

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

It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.

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 ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.

Victor Hugo

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

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

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

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!

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