Victor Hugo was born on February 26, 1802 in Besancon, France. He is considered as one of the best poets, novelists and dramatists in France.
He wrote extensive about social class. politics, justice and moral philosophy. His most popular novels are Les Misérables, Notre Dame de Paris and Les Travailleurs de la Mer.
Victor Hugo was also elected to the National assembly in 1848. As politician, he led a campaign for the abolishment of death penalty, fought for universal suffrage, free education and for the eradication of poverty.
He was reputed to be a man for the people and the fight he led for the social causes he believed in made him one of the most respected and loved person of his era. He passed away on May 22, 1885, and his funeral attracted more than 2 million people, more than Paris total population at that time.
His powerful words on the social, political and cultural affairs have changed not only France but the the world.
Read our famous quotations of Victor Hugo and let yourself be inspired by the man who shaped literature and whose actions helped defined the politics of our world.
on Beauty
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
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
Victor Hugo
To love beauty is to see light.
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
Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
Victor Hugo
on Art
Victor Hugo had an affinity for Arts and drawings. He created more than 4,000 drawings in his life.
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!
Victor Hugo Art
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
Victor Hugo Art
A great artist is a great man in a great child.
Victor Hugo Art
on Happiness
To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.
Victor Hugo
Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.
Victor Hugo
Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
Victor Hugo
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo
Inspiring Quotes
In 1841, Hugo was elected to the French Academy, which made him one of the most respected and inspirational “Homme de Lettres” in France and the world.
[table “75” could not be loaded /]on Life
Victor Hugo suffered so many setbacks, but still kept his optimism alive. He lost his two sons, his wife passed away, and his daughter was admitted to an insane asylum within a a brief period of time.
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
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
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
Victor Hugo
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
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
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Victor Hugo
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.’
Victor Hugo
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
Victor Hugo
on love
Before his death, Victor Hugo left a note with these words: To Love is to act
The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.
Victor Hugo
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.
Victor Hugo
Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.
Victor Hugo
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
Victor Hugo
To love another person is to see the face of God.
Victor Hugo
To love is to act.
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
I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.
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
on Man
The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
Victor Hugo
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
Victor Hugo
The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.
Victor Hugo
When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.
Victor Hugo
Genius: the superhuman in man.
Victor Hugo
Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
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
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
Victor Hugo
Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
Victor Hugo
Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.
Victor Hugo
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
Victor Hugo
The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.
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
on Woman
When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
Victor Hugo
No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.
Victor Hugo
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
Victor Hugo
It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.
Victor Hugo
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.
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
on Soul
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 soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
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
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
One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one’s soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
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
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor Hugo
on Time
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
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
Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
Nothing else in the world… not all the armies… is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
on God
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.
Victor Hugo
The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.
Victor Hugo
To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.
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
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
Victor Hugo
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
Victor Hugo
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
Victor Hugo
Conscience is God present in man.
Victor Hugo
Because one doesn’t like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
Victor Hugo
on Genius
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
Victor Hugo
Taste is the common sense of genius.
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
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
Victor Hugo
on Action
Despite his personal loss, Victor Hugo stayed motivated to fight for the cause of the people and he remained committed to the political change in his country.
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Victor Hugo
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
Victor Hugo
It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.
Victor Hugo
Reaction – a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.
Victor Hugo
on Poverty
The ox suffers, the cart complains.
Victor Hugo
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
Victor Hugo
He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.
Victor Hugo
Short Quotes
Despotism is a long crime.
Victor Hugo
Stupidity talks, vanity acts.
Victor Hugo
Wisdom is a sacred communion.
Victor Hugo
Liberation is not deliverance.
Victor Hugo
Habit is the nursery of errors.
Victor Hugo
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
Victor Hugo
Toleration is the best religion.
Victor Hugo
A library implies an act of faith.
Victor Hugo
Those who live are those who fight.
Victor Hugo
When liberty returns, I will return.
Victor Hugo
I’m religiously opposed to religion.
Victor Hugo
Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
Victor Hugo
To contemplate is to look at shadows.
Victor Hugo
To think of shadows is a serious thing.
Victor Hugo
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
Victor Hugo
Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
Victor Hugo
Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.
Victor Hugo
The flesh is the surface of the unknown.
Victor Hugo
I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
Victor Hugo
Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.
Victor Hugo
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
Victor Hugo
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Victor Hugo
No one can keep a secret better than a child.
Victor Hugo
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Victor Hugo
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
Victor Hugo
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
Victor Hugo
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
Victor Hugo
Joy’s smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
Victor Hugo
It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
Victor Hugo
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
Victor Hugo
It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
Victor Hugo
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
Victor Hugo
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Victor Hugo
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
Victor Hugo
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
Victor Hugo
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
Victor Hugo
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
Victor Hugo
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
Victor Hugo
The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
Victor Hugo
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
Victor Hugo
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
Victor Hugo
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
Victor Hugo
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
Victor Hugo
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
Victor Hugo
One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.
Victor Hugo
Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.
Victor Hugo
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
Victor Hugo
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
Victor Hugo
Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.
Victor Hugo
Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.
Victor Hugo
A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
Victor Hugo
But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don’t always succeed.
Victor Hugo
What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!
Victor Hugo
Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.
Victor Hugo
Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.
Victor Hugo
It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.
Victor Hugo
By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.
Victor Hugo
A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
Victor Hugo
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
Victor Hugo
Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.
Victor Hugo
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
Victor Hugo
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
Victor Hugo
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
Victor Hugo
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Victor Hugo
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
Victor Hugo
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Victor Hugo
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
Victor Hugo
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
Victor Hugo
The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
Victor Hugo
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
Victor Hugo
