Victor Hugo Quotes (468 Quotes)


    Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.



    To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just.



    He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.

    Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorably than love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; coffin, too. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all the things God has made, the human heart is the one that sheds most light, and alas! most night.

    At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette's dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.

    Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes.

    He had not yet lived long enough to have discovered that nothing is more close at hand then the impossible, and that what must be looked for is always the unforeseen.

    Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.

    Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

    Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.


    Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.


    It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.

    Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

    Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

    Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.

    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.

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

    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.

    Ask not the name of him who asks you for a bed. It is especially he whose name is a burden to him, who has need of an asylum (room).

    The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.

    The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.

    The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.


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

    There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.

    Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

    I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

    If it were (Is it not) outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution or wealth that chance had made, and who were, therefore, most worthy of indulgence.

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

    The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved.

    Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

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

    What I feel for you seems less of earth and more of a cloudless heaven.

    The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

    Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.

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


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

    Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

    There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

    In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead man will live. He will possess something higher than all thesea great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.

    There are obstinate and unknown braves who defend themselves inch by inch in the shadows against the fatal invasion of want and turpitude. There are noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees. No renown rewards, and no flourish of trumpets salutes. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, and poverty and battlefields which have their heroes.


    The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.


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