Top 121 Victor Hugo Quotes

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

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

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

To love beauty is to see light.

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.

Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

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

Those who live are those who fight.

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.

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

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

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

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.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn’t every war fought between men, between brothers?

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.

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.

The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.

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.’

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

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.

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

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!

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

The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 love is to act.

Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.

A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

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.

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.

Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.

I’m religiously opposed to religion.

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

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

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

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

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature.

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.

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

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

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.

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

Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.

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.

Despotism is a long crime.

Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.

Because one doesn’t like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.

Conscience is God present in man.

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.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

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

What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.

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.

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

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

Taste is the common sense of genius.

No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.

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

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

When liberty returns, I will return.

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.

Genius: the superhuman in man.

Liberation is not deliverance.

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

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

It is by suffering that human beings become angels.

Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

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.

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

One believes others will do what he will do to himself.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.

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

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