Victor Hugo's Quotes

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

It is by suffering that human beings become angels.

Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

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

Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.

He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.

Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.

No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.

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

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

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

Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

A library implies an act of faith.

Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

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.

A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.

Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!

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

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.

The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.

Those who live are those who fight.

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

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

To love is to act.

Toleration is the best religion.

Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

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

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

I'm religiously opposed to religion.

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

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

To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.

One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.

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

It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.

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

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

Habit is the nursery of errors.

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.

Conscience is God present in man.

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

No one can keep a secret better than a child.

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

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

Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.

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

I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.

It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.

The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.

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

When liberty returns, I will return.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

Despotism is a long crime.

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.

Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.