Victor Hugo Quotes

452 Sourced Quotes

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.

Victor Hugo
He went to mass rather from good-feeling than from devotion, and because he loved the faces of men, but hated their noise and he found them, at church only, gathered together and silent.

Victor Hugo
Did a voice whisper in his ear that he had just passed through the decisive hour of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him, that if, thereafter, he should not be the best of men, he would be the worst?

Victor Hugo
The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.

Victor Hugo
From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty

Victor Hugo
Human thought has no limit. At its risk and peril, it analyzes and dissects its own fascination. We could almost say that, by a sort of splendid reaction, it fascinates nature; the mysterious world surrounding us returns what it receives; it is likely that contemplators are contemplated.

Victor Hugo
Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?

Victor Hugo
Everything falls and is effaced. A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet, so much tumult on the surface!

Victor Hugo
The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment's silence, "Perhaps more so.

Victor Hugo
Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art — the finest of all, perhaps — truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.

Victor Hugo
Good actions are the invisible hinges of the doors of heaven.

Victor Hugo
Behold, then, a new religion, a new society; upon this twofold foundation there must inevitably spring up a new poetry.

Victor Hugo
Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.

Victor Hugo
While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.' No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday.

Victor Hugo
It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.

Victor Hugo
Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less.

Victor Hugo
Sacrificing the earth for paradise is giving up the substance for the shadow.

Victor Hugo
Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder.

Victor Hugo
Logic ignores the almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.

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

Victor Hugo
Monsieur' to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea; ignominy thirsts for respect.

Victor Hugo
Napoleon... mighty somnambulist of a vanished dream.

Victor Hugo
Desiring always to be in mourning, he clothed himself with night.

Victor Hugo
One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.

Victor Hugo
God took his softest clay and his purest colors, and made a fragile jewel, mysterious and caressing — the finger of woman; then he fell asleep. The devil awoke, and at the end of that rosy finger put — a nail.

Victor Hugo
Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms.

Victor Hugo
Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

Victor Hugo
At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Victor Hugo
The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.

Victor Hugo
M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.

Victor Hugo