Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” Quotes (191 Quotes)

Faith is necessary to men; woe to him who believes in nothing!

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect on. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.

Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.

Now, one cannot read nonsense with impunity.

Sleep comes more easily than it returns.

The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.

The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake -- let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self.

To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.

Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do.

The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.

Books are cold but safe friends

For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.

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.

It does not do to let the senses fall asleep, whether in the shade of the sacred tree or in the shadow of an army.

Love partakes of the soul itself. it is of the same nature. like it, it is a divine spark, like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable, it is the point of fire which is within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and nothing can extinguish.

Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voices of reason can be heard.

So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.

The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.

The world is like Olympus - even a thief is accepted in it if he is also a god.

To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.

Win a lottery-prize and you are a cleaver man. Winners are adulated. To be born with a caul is everything; luck is what matters. Be fortunate and you will be thought great.

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom.

But that which pleases us in people who are rising pleases us less in the case of people who are falling.

Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.... Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!

He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends

It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no moral element enters.

Loving is almost a substitute for thinking. Love is a burning forgetfulness of all other things. How shall we ask passion to be logical?

Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a finger -- that would suffice for my eternity!

So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight.

The life of the cenobite is a human problem. When we speak of convents, those seats of error but innocence, of mistaken views but good intentions, of ignorance but devotion, of torment but martyrdom, we must nearly always say yes or no...The monastery is a renunciation. Self-sacrifice, even when misdirected, is still self-sacrifice. To assume as duty a strict error has its peculiar grandeur.

There are things stronger than the strongest man...

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

With Cosette's garter, Homer would make the Iliad. He would put into his poem an old babbler like me, and he would call him Nestor.

A creditor is worst than a master; for a master owns only your physical presence, whereas a creditor owns your dignity and may affront it.

Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?

From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty

He who has not been a stubborn accuser in prosperity should hold his peace in the face of ruin.

It is an error to imagine that fate can be exhausted, and that one has reached the bottom of anything whatever.

M. Mabeuf's political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.

One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.

Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.

The peculiarity of prudery is to station the more sentries the less the fortress is menaced.

There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.

To love or have loved is all-sufficing. We must not ask for more. No other pearl is to be found in the shadowfolds of life. To love is an accomplishment.

Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good.

A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.

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

Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he sat up, a long stream of blood rolled down his face, he raised both arms in air, looked in the direction whence the shot came, and began to sing.

Her soul trembled on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.