Victor-Marie Hugo, sometimes nicknamed the Ocean Man, was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms. His most famous works are the novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables.
Victor Hugo Quotes
1. “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.”
— Victor Hugo
2. “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
— Victor Hugo
3. “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
— Victor Hugo
4. “Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.”
— Victor Hugo
5. “The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the fainthearted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal.”
— Victor Hugo
6. “To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.”
— Victor Hugo
7. “Don’t educate your children to be rich. Educate them to be happy, so they know the value of things, not the price.”
— Victor Hugo
8. “Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.”
— Victor Hugo
9. “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
— Victor Hugo
10. “No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”
— Victor Hugo
11. “People do not lack strength, they lack will.”
— Victor Hugo
12. “Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.”
— Victor Hugo
13. “Laughter is sunshine, it chases winter from the human face.”
— Victor Hugo
14. “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
— Victor Hugo
15. “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
16. “To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”
— Victor Hugo
17. “Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.”
— Victor Hugo
18. “To love another person is to see the face of God.”
— Victor Hugo
19. “Those who do not weep, do not see.”
— Victor Hugo
20. “Go to sleep in peace. God is awake.”
— Victor Hugo
21. “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”
— Victor Hugo
22. “Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind. ”
— Victor Hugo
23. “Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.”
— Victor Hugo
24. “Do you hear the people sing Lost in the valley of the night? It is the music of a people Who are climbing to the light. For the wretched of the earth There is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest night will end And the sun will rise.”
— Victor Hugo
25. “Go out in the world and work like money doesn’t matter, sing as if no one is listening, love as if you have never been hurt, and dance as if no one is watching.”
— Victor Hugo
26. “Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.”
— Victor Hugo
27. “To love beauty is to see light.”
— Victor Hugo
28. “A writer is a world trapped in a person.”
— Victor Hugo
29. “Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.”
— Victor Hugo
30. “Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.”
— Victor Hugo
31. “Conscience is God present in man.”
— Victor Hugo
32. “All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
— Victor Hugo
33. “Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men.”
— Victor Hugo
34. “Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.”
— Victor Hugo
35. “I had a dream my life would be different from this hell I am living, so different from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.”
— Victor Hugo
36. “If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned!”
— Victor Hugo
37. “When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.”
— Victor Hugo
38. “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
39. “Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.”
— Victor Hugo
40. “Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.”
— Victor Hugo
41. “Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.”
— Victor Hugo
42. “What makes night within us may leave stars.”
— Victor Hugo
43. “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
— Victor Hugo
44. “Not being heard is no reason for silence.”
— Victor Hugo
45. “Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.”
— Victor Hugo
46. “Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.”
— Victor Hugo
47. “It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.”
— Victor Hugo
48. “Dreaming is happiness. Waiting is life.”
— Victor Hugo
49. “God knows better than we do what we need.”
— Victor Hugo
50. “There is in every village a torch – the teacher; and an extinguisher – the priest.”
— Victor Hugo
51. “To contemplate is to look at shadows.”
— Victor Hugo
52. “I’m not totally useless. I can be used as a bad example.”
— Victor Hugo
53. “Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.”
— Victor Hugo
54. “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
55. “To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.”
— Victor Hugo
56. “The malicious have a dark happiness.”
— Victor Hugo
57. “When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.”
— Victor Hugo
58. “Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
— Victor Hugo
59. “God has made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger.”
— Victor Hugo
60. “The left-handed are precious; they take places which are inconvenient for the rest.”
— Victor Hugo
61. “The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.”
— Victor Hugo
62. “You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea.”
— Victor Hugo
63. “You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.”
— Victor Hugo
64. “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
65. “The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.”
— Victor Hugo
66. “Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.”
— Victor Hugo
67. “When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.”
— Victor Hugo
68. “Love is like a tree, it grows of its own accord, it puts down deep roots into our whole being.”
— Victor Hugo
69. “The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.”
— Victor Hugo
70. “To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!”
— Victor Hugo
71. “There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.”
— Victor Hugo
72. “Our mind is enriched by what we receive, our heart by what we give.”
— Victor Hugo
73. “If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.”
— Victor Hugo
74. “To know, to think, to dream. That is everything.”
— Victor Hugo
75. “Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.”
— Victor Hugo
76. “Woman, nude, is the blue sky. Clouds and garments are an obstacle to contemplation. Beauty and infinity would be gazed upon unveiled.”
— Victor Hugo
77. “There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering – a hell of boredom.”
— Victor Hugo
78. “The first symptom of true love in a man is timidity, in a young woman, boldness. This is surprising, and yet nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming each the other’s qualities.”
— Victor Hugo
79. “If you don’t build castles in the air you won’t build anything on the ground.”
— Victor Hugo
80. “Freedom begins where it ends ignorance.”
— Victor Hugo
81. “Nothing is more true, more real, than the primeval magnetic disturbances that two souls may communicate to one another, through the tiny sparks of a moment’s glance.”
— Victor Hugo
82. “The sewer is the conscience of the city.”
— Victor Hugo
83. “The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness.”
— Victor Hugo
84. “Excitement is not enjoyment: in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped, not bolted at a swallow.”
— Victor Hugo
85. “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
86. “Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.”
— Victor Hugo
87. “Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.”
— Victor Hugo
88. “When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.”
— Victor Hugo
89. “I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.”
— Victor Hugo
90. “Animals run no risk of going to hell. They are already there.”
— Victor Hugo
91. “Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.”
— Victor Hugo
92. “So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.”
— Victor Hugo
93. “Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.”
— Victor Hugo
94. “He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends.”
— Victor Hugo
95. “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”
— Victor Hugo
96. “He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”
— Victor Hugo
97. “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.”
— Victor Hugo
98. “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
99. “Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.”
— Victor Hugo
100. “Let us sacrifice one day to gain perhaps a whole life.”
— Victor Hugo
101. “Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.”
— Victor Hugo
102. “Religion, Society, and Nature – these are the three struggles of man.”
— Victor Hugo
103. “Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.”
— Victor Hugo
104. “Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.”
— Victor Hugo
105. “Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.”
— Victor Hugo
106. “Ce n’est rien de mourir, C’est affreux de ne pas vivre.”
— Victor Hugo
107. “If suffer we must, let’s suffer on the heights.”
— Victor Hugo
108. “A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.”
— Victor Hugo
109. “Death belongs to God alone; by what right do men touch that unknown thing?”
— Victor Hugo
110. “All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.”
— Victor Hugo
111. “Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart; I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets, and the roses, as at twenty years ago.”
— Victor Hugo
112. “If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it’s a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.”
— Victor Hugo
113. “If people did not love one another, I really don’t see what use there would be in having any spring.”
— Victor Hugo
114. “Toleration is the best religion.”
— Victor Hugo
115. “What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”
— Victor Hugo
116. “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
117. “My revenge is fraternity! No more frontiers! The Rhine for everyone! Let us be the same Republic, let us be the United States of Europe, let us be the continental federation, let us be European liberty, let us be universal peace!”
— Victor Hugo
118. “He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.”
— Victor Hugo
119. “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”
— Victor Hugo
120. “We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.”
— Victor Hugo
121. “The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.”
— Victor Hugo
122. “Taste is the common sense of genius.”
— Victor Hugo
123. “Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.”
— Victor Hugo
124. “Inspiration and genius -one and the same.”
— Victor Hugo
125. “An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.”
— Victor Hugo
126. “Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.”
— Victor Hugo
127. “Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?”
— Victor Hugo
128. “What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.”
— Victor Hugo
129. “Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows.”
— Victor Hugo
130. “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
131. “God made only water, but man made wine.”
— Victor Hugo
132. “Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.”
— Victor Hugo
133. “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
134. “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”
— Victor Hugo
135. “If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes of the old, you see light.”
— Victor Hugo
136. “Sacrificing the earth for paradise is giving up the substance for the shadow.”
— Victor Hugo
137. “The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.”
— Victor Hugo
138. “Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”
— Victor Hugo
139. “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
140. “Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.”
— Victor Hugo
141. “Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.”
— Victor Hugo
142. “What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.”
— Victor Hugo
143. “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
144. “Love is reducing the universe to one being.”
— Victor Hugo
145. “I think, therefore I doubt.”
— Victor Hugo
146. “Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.”
— Victor Hugo
147. “Another story must begin!”
— Victor Hugo
148. “God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.”
— Victor Hugo
149. “When two souls have finally found each other, there is established between them a union which begins on earth and continues forever in heaven.”
— Victor Hugo
150. “The clouds, – the only birds that never sleep.”
— Victor Hugo
151. “A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in – what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.”
— Victor Hugo
152. “Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it – there is a certain shameful solidarity.”
— Victor Hugo
153. “The learned man knows that he is ignorant.”
— Victor Hugo
154. “Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.”
— Victor Hugo
155. “You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness. We pardon to the extent that we love. Love is knowing that even when you are alone, you will never be lonely again, and great happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. Loved for ourselves, and even loved in spite of ourselves.”
— Victor Hugo
156. “As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.”
— Victor Hugo
157. “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
158. “For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.”
— Victor Hugo
159. “When I speak to you about myself, I am speaking to you about yourself. How is it you don’t see that?”
— Victor Hugo
160. “Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
— Victor Hugo
161. “A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.”
— Victor Hugo
162. “To divinise is human, to humanise is divine.”
— Victor Hugo
163. “There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”
— Victor Hugo
164. “At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted on her lips, a kiss more burning than the red-hot iron of the executioner.”
— Victor Hugo
165. “Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.”
— Victor Hugo
166. “The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.”
— Victor Hugo
167. “There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius.”
— Victor Hugo
168. “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
169. “God is behind everything, but everything hides God.”
— Victor Hugo
170. “La vie n’est qu’une longue perte de tout ce qu’on aime.”
— Victor Hugo
171. “Philosophy is the microscope of thought.”
— Victor Hugo
172. “A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.”
— Victor Hugo
173. “The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.”
— Victor Hugo
174. “Morality is truth in full bloom.”
— Victor Hugo
175. “One drop of wine is enough to redden a whole glass of water.”
— Victor Hugo
176. “The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.”
— Victor Hugo
177. “It is God who makes woman beautiful, it is the devil who makes her pretty.”
— Victor Hugo
178. “Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.”
— Victor Hugo
179. “She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.”
— Victor Hugo
180. “You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman.”
— Victor Hugo
181. “Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.”
— Victor Hugo
182. “A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.”
— Victor Hugo
183. “If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.”
— Victor Hugo
184. “The man is placed where the Earth ends, the woman, where the heaven starts.”
— Victor Hugo
185. “Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars. Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out of a dark background.”
— Victor Hugo
186. “First it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. Now it is necessary to civilize man in relation to nature and the animals.”
— Victor Hugo
187. “Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.”
— Victor Hugo
188. “Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.”
— Victor Hugo
189. “Gutenberg’s invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution.”
— Victor Hugo
190. “Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.”
— Victor Hugo
191. “The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.”
— Victor Hugo
192. “It is man’s consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.”
— Victor Hugo
193. “Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.”
— Victor Hugo
194. “Those who live are those who fight.”
— Victor Hugo
195. “At the shrine of friendship never say die, let the wine of friendship never run dry.”
— Victor Hugo
196. “It is by suffering that human beings become angels.”
— Victor Hugo
197. “I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality. -Claude Frollo.”
— Victor Hugo
198. “One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”
— Victor Hugo
199. “She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.”
— Victor Hugo
200. “We teachers make the road, others will make the journey.”
— Victor Hugo
