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

“Music…is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what revery is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.”

Victor Hugo book William Shakespeare

La musique...est la vapeur de l’art. Elle est à la poésie ce que la rêverie est à la pensée, ce que le fluide est au liquide, ce que l’océan des nuées est à l’océan des ondes.
Part I, Book II, Chapter IV
William Shakespeare (1864)

Art , Music

“Literal translations:”

Victor Hugo book The History of a Crime

On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées.
One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.
One withstands the invasion of armies; one does not withstand the invasion of ideas.
Histoire d'un Crime (The History of a Crime) [written 1852, published 1877], Conclusion, ch. X. Trans. T.H. Joyce and Arthur Locker http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Histoire_d%E2%80%99un_crime_-_Conclusion#X.
Alternative translations and paraphrased variants:
One cannot resist an idea whose time has come.
No one can resist an idea whose time has come.
Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.
Armies cannot stop an idea whose time has come.
No army can stop an idea whose time has come.
Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.
Many of these paraphrases have a closer match in a passage from Gustave Aimard's earlier-published novel Les Francs-Tireurs (1861):
there is something more powerful than the brute force of bayonets: it is the idea whose time has come and hour struck
Original French: Il y a quelque chose de plus puissant que la force brutale des baïonnettes: c'est l'idée dont le temps est venu et l'heure est sonnée
Source: [The Freebooters, Gustave, Aimard, (tr. unknown), 1861, London, Ward and Lock, 57, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/chi.087603619?urlappend=%3Bseq=67]
Source: [Les Francs Tireurs, Gustave, Aimard, 1861, Paris, Amyot, 68, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b596684?urlappend=%3Bseq=76]

“To love is to act”

Victor Hugo

Aimer, c'est agir
Last words of his diary, written two weeks before his death, published in Victor Hugo : Complete Writings (1970), edited by Jean-Jacques Pauvert

Love

“As for how you pray, the words do not matter if they are sincere. Turn your prayer book upside down and face the infinite.”

Victor Hugo

Books , Sincerity

“If we're just a thousand, then, here I am! Even if
They're just a hundred, still I face Sylla;
If ten still stand, I'll be the tenth;
And if there is only one left, I'll be this one!”

Victor Hugo

“He is asleep. Though his mettle was sorely tried,
He lived, and when he lost his angel, died.
It happened calmly, on its own.
The way night comes when day is done.”

Victor Hugo

Angels , Way , Night

“Sing, laugh; be happy, be famous;
Each one of you will soon be in the darkness.”

Victor Hugo

Singing , Happiness

“I see a new light.”

Victor Hugo

Light

“Let us have faith.
No, let us not be cast down.
To despair is to desert.
Let us look to the future.
The future,—no one knows what tempests still separate us from port, but the port, the distant and radiant port, is in sight; the future, we repeat, is the republic for all men; let us add, the future is peace with all men.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part Second, II
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Despair , Peace , Faith , Future

“Now it is all over. The French nation is dead.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part Second, I
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Dead

“There was a nation among the nations, which was a sort of elder brother in this family of the oppressed, a prophet in the human tribe. This nation took the initiative of the whole human movement. It went on, saying, "Come!" and the rest followed. As a complement to the fraternity of men, in the Gospel, it taught the fraternity of nations. It spoke by the voice of its writers, of its poets, of its philosophers, of its orators, as by a single mouth, and its words flew to the extremities of the earth, to rest, like tongues of fire, upon the brow of all nations. It presided over the communion of intellects.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part Second, I
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Family , Men

“They determined, once for all, to make an end of the spirit of freedom and emancipation, and to drive back and repress for ever the upward tendency of mankind. To undo the labour of twenty generations; to kill in the nineteenth century, by strangulation... Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire, religious scrutiny, philosophical scrutiny, universal scrutiny; to crush throughout all Europe this immense vegetation of free thought, here a tender blade, there a sturdy oak; ...to resuscitate all they could of the Inquisition, and to stifle all they could of intelligence; to stultify youth, in other words to brutalize the future;... to say to nations: "Eat and think no more;"”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part Second, I
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Freedom , Future , Intelligence , Universe

“With moral degradation goes political degradation.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part First, III
Napoleon the Little (1852)

“On the day when the human conscience shall lose its bearings, on the day when success shall carry the day before that forum, all will be at an end. The last moral gleam will reascend to heaven. Darkness will be in the mind of man. You will have nothing to do but to devour one another, wild beasts that you are!”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part First, III
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Success

“There is... always, in a large population like that of France, a class which is ignorant, which suffers, covets, and struggles, placed between the brutish instinct which impels it to take, and the moral law which invites it to labour. In the grievous and oppressed condition in which it still is, this class, in order to maintain itself in probity and well-doing, requires all the pure and holy light that emanates from the Gospel; it requires that, on the one hand, the spirit of Jesus Christ, and, on the other, the spirit of the French Revolution, should address to it the same manly words, and should never cease to point out to it, as the only lights worthy of the eyes of man, the exalted and mysterious laws of human destiny,—self-denial, devotion, sacrifice, the labour which leads to material well-being, the probity which leads to inward well-being; even with this perennial instruction, at once divine and human, this class, so worthy of sympathy and fraternity, often succumbs.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part First, III
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Law , Light , Suffering , Self-confidence

“From every agglomeration of men, from every city, from every nation, there inevitably arises a collective force. Place this collective force at the service of liberty, let it rule by universal suffrage, the city becomes a commune, the nation becomes a republic. This collective force is not, of its nature, intelligent. Belonging to all, it belongs to no one; it floats about, so to speak, outside of the people.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part First, II
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Intelligence , People , Communication , Nature

“If it should happen some day that a man, having in his hand the five hundred thousand officeholders who constitute the government, and the four hundred thousand soldiers composing the army, if it should happen that this man should tear up the Constitution, should violate every law, break every oath, trample upon every right, commit every crime, do you know what your irremovable magistrates, instructors in the right, and guardians of the law, would do? They would hold their tongues.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Book VIII, IV
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Tear , Law

“Be proud, Frenchmen! Lift high your heads, Frenchmen! You are no longer anything, and this man is everything! He holds in his hand your intelligence, as a child holds a bird. Any day he pleases, he can strangle the genius of France.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Book V, IX
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Bird , Intelligence

“Now there is no more noise, no more confusion, no more talking, no more parliament, or parliamentarism. The Corps Législatif, the Senate, the Council of State, have all had their mouths sewn up.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Book V, IX
Napoleon the Little (1852)

“Now it is all over. The great work is accomplished. And the results of the work!... Get all you can, gorge yourselves, grow a fat paunch; it is no longer a question of being a great people, of being a powerful people, of being a free nation, of casting a bright light; France no longer sees its way to that.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Book V, IX
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Way , Light , People , Question

“Two great problems hang over the world. War must disappear, and conquest must continue. These two necessities of a growing civilization seemed to exclude each other. How satisfy the one without failing the other?”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Book V, VII
Napoleon the Little (1852)

War , Problem , World

“From this tribune, incessantly vibrating, gushed forth perpetually a sort of sonorous flood, a mighty oscillation of sentiments and ideas, which, from billow to billow, and from people to people, flowed to the utmost confines of the earth, to set in motion those intelligent waves which are called souls.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Book V, V
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Idea , Soul , Intelligence , People

“This tribune was the terror of every tyranny and fanaticism, it was the hope of every one who was oppressed under Heaven. Whoever placed his foot upon that height, felt distinctly the pulsations of the great heart of mankind. There, providing he was a man of earnest purpose, his soul swelled within him, and shone without. A breath of universal philanthropy seized him, and filled his mind as the breeze fills the sail; so long as his feet rested upon those four planks, he was a stronger and a better man; he felt at that consecrated minute as if he were living the life of all the nations; words of charity for all men came to his lips; beyond the Assembly, grouped at his feet, and frequently in a tumult, he beheld the people, attentive, serious, with ears strained, and fingers on lips; and beyond the people, the human race, plunged in thought, seated in circles, and listening.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Book V, V
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Soul , Hope , Heart , People

“We who combat them are "the eternal enemies of order.". We are—for they can as yet find nothing but this worn-out word—we are demagogues. In the language of the Duke of Alva, to believe in the sacredness of the human conscience, to resist the Inquisition, to brave the state for one's faith, to draw the sword for one's country, to defend one's worship, one's city, one's home, one's house, one's family, and one's God, was called vagabondism... The man is a demagogue in the nineteenth century, who in the sixteenth would have been a vagabond.”

Victor Hugo

Book II, XI
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Family , God , Drawing , Faith

“The present government is a hand stained with blood, which dips a finger in the holy water.”

Victor Hugo

Book II, X
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Water

“Let us sum up this government! Who is at the Élysée and the Tuileries? Crime. Who is established at the Luxembourg? Baseness. Who at the Palais Bourbon? Imbecility. Who at the Palais d'Orsay?...And who are in the prisons... in the dungeons...in exile? Law, honour, intelligence, liberty, and the right.”

Victor Hugo

Book I, VI
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Intelligence , Law

“Alas! of what is France thinking? Of a surety, we must awake this slumbering nation, we must take it by the arm, we must shake it, we must speak to it; we must scour the fields, enter the villages, go into the barracks, speak to the soldier who no longer knows what he is doing, speak to the labourer who has in his cabin an engraving of the Emperor, and who, for that reason, votes for everything they ask; we must remove the radiant phantom that dazzles their eyes; this whole situation is nothing but a huge and deadly joke.”

Victor Hugo

Book I, VI
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Thinking

“At certain epochs in history, the whole human race, from all points of the earth, fix their eyes upon some mysterious spot whence it seems that universal destiny is about to issue.”

Victor Hugo

Book I, VI
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Universe , History

“At certain epochs of history, there are pleiades of great men; at other epochs, there are pleiades of vagabonds. But do not confound the epoch, the moment of Louis Bonaparte, with the 19th century: the toadstool sprouts at the foot of the oak, but it is not the oak.”

Victor Hugo

Book I, VI
Napoleon the Little (1852)

History , Men

“It is time, we repeat, that this monstrous slumber of men's consciences should end. It must not be, after that fearful scandal, the triumph of crime, that a scandal still more fearful should be presented to mankind: the indifference of the civilized world.”

Victor Hugo

Book I, III
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Time , Indifference , World , Fear

“This was the work that the nineteenth century had done among men, and was continuing in glorious, fashion to do,—that century of sterility, that century of domination, that century of decadence, that century of degradation, as it is called by the pedants, the rhetoricians, the imbeciles, and all that filthy brood of bigots, of knaves, and of sharpers, who sanctimoniously slaver gall upon glory, who assert that Pascal was a madman, Voltaire a coxcomb, and Rousseau a brute, and whose triumph it would be to put a fool's-cap upon the human race.”

Victor Hugo

Conclusion, Part Second, II
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Fashion , Fools , Men

“This age proclaims the sovereignty of the citizen, and the inviolability of life; it crowns the people, and consecrates man. In art, it possesses all varieties of genius,—writers, orators, poets, historians, publicists, philosophers, painters, sculptors, musicians; majesty, grace, power, force, splendour, colour, form, style; it renews its strength in the real and in the ideal, and bears in its hand the two thunderbolts, the true and the beautiful. In science it accomplishes unheard-of miracles; it makes of cotton salt petre, of steam a horse, of the voltaic battery a workman, of the electric fluid a messenger, of the sun a painter; it waters itself with subterranean streams, pending the time when it shall warm itself with the central fire; it opens upon the two infinites those two windows, the telescope upon the infinitely great, the microscope upon the infinitely little, and it finds stars in the first abyss, and insects in the second, which prove to it the existence of God... It annihilates time, it annihilates space, it annihilates suffering; it writes a letter from Paris to London, and has an answer in ten minutes; it cuts off a man's leg, the man sings and smiles.”

Victor Hugo

Conclusion, Part Second, II
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Singing , God , Time , Sun

“Let us proclaim it aloud, let us proclaim it in our fall and in our defeat, this is the greatest of all ages! and do you know the reason why? because it is the mildest.”

Victor Hugo

Conclusion, Part Second, II
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Age

“Let us not fall into the vulgar error, which is to curse and to dishonour the age in which we live. However deep the shame of the present, whatever blows we receive from the fluctuation of events, whatever the apparent desertion or the momentary lethargy of mental vigour, none of us... will repudiate the magnificent epoch in which we live, the virile age of mankind.”

Victor Hugo

Conclusion, Part Second, II
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Error , Age

“I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.”

Victor Hugo

Written at the age of 15 in one of his notebooks (c. 1817), as quoted in The Literary Movement in France During the Nineteenth Century (1897) by Georges Pellissier