Victor Hugo Quotes

452 Sourced Quotes

Poor mothers, he thought. There is one thing sadder than to see their children die: to see them lead evil lives.

Victor Hugo
Hope! hope, you miserable! There is no infinite mourning, no incurable evils, no eternal hell!

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

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

Victor Hugo
"Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again."What love!" said the unhappy girl with a shudder.He resumed,—"The love of a damned soul.

Victor Hugo
She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.

Victor Hugo
The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.

Victor Hugo
Let us suffer if we must, but let us suffer on the heights.

Victor Hugo
God created the coquette as soon as he had made the fool.

Victor Hugo
Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.

Victor Hugo
My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should liked to be wholly a beast like that goat. - Quasimodo

Victor Hugo
Joy is my character, 'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Misery is my trousseau 'Tis the fault of Rousseau.
Gavroche speaking

Victor Hugo
This is the battle between day and night... I see black light.

Victor Hugo
Glory, ambition, armies, fleets, thrones, crowns: playthings of grown children.

Victor Hugo
I didn't believe it could be so monstrous. It's wrong to be so absorbed in divine law as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men tough that unknown thing?

Victor Hugo
To be wicked does not insure prosperity, for the inn did not succeed well.

Victor Hugo
It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.

Victor Hugo
Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament.

Victor Hugo
Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.

Victor Hugo
The soul does not give itself up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.

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

Victor Hugo
Alas! to have risen does not prevent falling. We see this in history oftener than we would wish.

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

Victor Hugo
Not seeing people allows you to think of them as perfect in all kinds of ways.

Victor Hugo
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.

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

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

Victor Hugo
His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.

Victor Hugo
You say, "Where goest Thou?" I cannot tell, And still go on. But if the way be straight I cannot go amiss: before me lies Dawn and the day: the night behind me: that Suffices me: I break the bounds: I see, And nothing more; believe and nothing less. My future is not one of my concerns.

Victor Hugo