Victor Hugo Quotes

452 Sourced Quotes

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

Victor Hugo
What is called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, is generally fool's gold.

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
Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.

Victor Hugo
Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. 'The Spirit is a garden,' said he

Victor Hugo
Creation lives, grows, and multiplies: man is but a witness.

Victor Hugo
A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this monster existed. Things could not go on in this manner.

Victor Hugo
All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.

Victor Hugo
The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius...

Victor Hugo
I am not in the world to care for my life, but for souls.

Victor Hugo
So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened.

Victor Hugo
He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.

Victor Hugo
A doctor's door should never be closed, a priest's door should always be open.

Victor Hugo
The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.

Victor Hugo
A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children." from chapter VIII of Les Miserables

Victor Hugo
That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.

Victor Hugo
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?

Victor Hugo
Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

Victor Hugo
What's our baggage? Only vows,
Happiness, and all our care,
And the flower that sweetly shows
Nestling lightly in your hair.

Victor Hugo