Victor Hugo Quotes

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308 Quotes to Uplift Your Spirit and Guide You with Timeless Wisdom

“Be happy without picking flaws.”

“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

“Gentlemen of the human race, I say to hell with the lot of you.”

“I was dying when you came.”

“He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality”

“What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.”

“To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.”

“You are adorable, mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope.”

“The earth is a great piece of stupidity.”

“A writer is a world trapped in a person.”

“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.”

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

“There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust war.”

“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!”

“‎"Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again."What love!" said the unhappy girl with a shudder. He resumed,--"The love of a damned soul.”

“To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie.”

“He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.
Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.
Nothing is more sublime.”

“Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.”

“To pay compliments to the one we love is the first method of caressing, a demi-audacity venturing. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.”

“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.”

“But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.”

“There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.”

“Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.”

“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.”

“A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children."

from chapter VIII of Les Miserables”

“One drop of wine is enough to redden a whole glass of water.”

“Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.”

“God will bless you,' said he, 'you are an angel since you take care of the flowers.'
'No,' she replied. 'I am the devil, but that's all the same to me.”

“To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!”

“To destroy abuses is not enough; Habits must also be changed. The windmill has gone, but the wind is still there."
~old man G--- to Monseigneur Bienvenu Myriel”

“The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.”

“A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.”

“Are you afraid of the good you might do?”

“We need those who pray constantly to compensate for those who do not pray at all.”

“Another story must begin!”

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

“He who despairs is wrong.”

“… there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables”

“He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.”

“You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.”

“The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.”

“… Man lives by affirmation even more than he does by bread.”

“If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.”

“I see black light (his last words)”

“Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with the other.”

“Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy.”

“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.”

“Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety…. One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.”

“As for methods of prayer, all are good, as long as they are sincere.”