Victor Hugo – 85 Quotes – The Quote List

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85 Quotes by Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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.

– Victor Hugo

I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!

– 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

To love beauty is to see light.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

The ideal and the beautiful are identical the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form hence idea and substance are cognate.

– Victor Hugo

Toleration is the best religion.

– Victor Hugo

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

– 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

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

A library implies an act of faith.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

– Victor Hugo

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

Conscience is God present in man.

– Victor Hugo

The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.

– Victor Hugo

To love another person is to see the face of God.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

Because one doesn’t like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.

– Victor Hugo

To think is of itself to be useful it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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.

– Victor Hugo

Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.

– Victor Hugo

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.

– Victor Hugo

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

– Victor Hugo

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

– Victor Hugo

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

– Victor Hugo

There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.

– Victor Hugo

The three great problems of this century the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– 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

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

– Victor Hugo

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

– Victor Hugo

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

– Victor Hugo

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity in a girl boldness.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.

– 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

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

– Victor Hugo

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

– Victor Hugo

Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

– Victor Hugo

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.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

I’m religiously opposed to religion.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

– Victor Hugo

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.

– Victor Hugo

People do not lack strength they lack will.

– Victor Hugo

To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– Victor Hugo

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

– 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

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

– Victor Hugo

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

– Victor Hugo

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

– Victor Hugo

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

– Victor Hugo

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

– Victor Hugo

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.

– Victor Hugo