Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French novelist Victor Hugo.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
Victor-Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote abundantly in an exceptional variety of genres: lyrics, satires, epics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history, critical essays, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, and letters public and private, as well as dramas in verse and prose.
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
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.
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
Conscience is God present in man.
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
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.
A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.
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.
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
A library implies an act of faith.
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
To love beauty is to see light.
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.
Those who live are those who fight.
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
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.
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.
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
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.
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.
To love another person is to see the face of God.
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.