Victor Hugo Quotes

451 Sourced Quotes

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
Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

Victor Hugo
Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.

Victor Hugo
God will bless you,' said he, 'you are an angel since you take care of the flowers.' 'No,' she replied. 'I am the devil, but that's all the same to me.

Victor Hugo
In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and winding,... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.

Victor Hugo
He sought...to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars.

Victor Hugo
The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.

Victor Hugo
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.

Victor Hugo
Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything.

Victor Hugo
A man may be a fine genius, and yet understand nothing of an art which he has not studied.

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

Victor Hugo
Science seeks perpetual motion. She has found it: it is Science herself.

Victor Hugo
Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.

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

Victor Hugo
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.

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

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
The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests upon anything but what is elevated and great.

Victor Hugo
This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.

Victor Hugo
A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.

Victor Hugo
And, moreover, when it happens that both are sincere and good, nothing will mix and amalgamate more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. In reality, they are the same kind of man. One has devoted himself to country upon earth, the other to his country in heaven; there is no other difference.

Victor Hugo
Would you realize what Revolution is, call it Progress; and would you realize what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.

Victor Hugo
Each of our passions, even love, has a stomach that must not be overloaded. We must in everything write the word 'finis' in time; we must restrain ourselves, when it becomes urgent; we must draw the bolt on the appetite, play a fantasia on the violin, then break the strings with our own hand. The Wise man is he who knows when and how to stop.

Victor Hugo
There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven; there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the conscience.

Victor Hugo
Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.

Victor Hugo