Top 990 Quotes & Sayings by Victor Hugo

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French novelist Victor Hugo.

Last updated on September 16, 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.

French - Novelist | February 26, 1802 - May 22, 1885

Source: Wikipedia

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

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

Victor Hugo

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Victor Hugo

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

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

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

Conscience is God present in man.

Victor Hugo

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Victor Hugo

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

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

Victor Hugo

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.

Victor Hugo

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

Victor Hugo

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

Victor Hugo

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

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

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

Victor Hugo

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

Victor Hugo

A library implies an act of faith.

Victor Hugo

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.

Victor Hugo

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

Victor Hugo

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Victor Hugo

To love beauty is to see light.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

Those who live are those who fight.

Victor Hugo

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.

Victor Hugo

Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

Victor Hugo

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

Victor Hugo

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

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

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

Victor Hugo

The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

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

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

Victor Hugo

Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.

Victor Hugo

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.

Victor Hugo

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.