Victor Hugo Quotes

451 Sourced Quotes

There is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables

Victor Hugo
God became a man, granted. The devil became a woman.

Victor Hugo
For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.

Victor Hugo
Is it not a thing divine to have a smile which, none know how, has the power to lighten the weight of that enormous chain which all the living in common drag behind them?

Victor Hugo
O youth! thou often tearest thy wings against the thorns of voluptuousness!

Victor Hugo
It was SHE. Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meaning contained in the three letters of this word 'she.

Victor Hugo
Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.

Victor Hugo
God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.

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
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
In disorder there can be no fecundation. Chaos is a celibate.

Victor Hugo
From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at a time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.

Victor Hugo
To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just.

Victor Hugo
The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being.

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

Victor Hugo
There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

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

Victor Hugo
Cimourdain was one of those men who have a voice within them, and who listen to it. Such men seem absent-minded; they are not; they are all attention.
Cimourdain knew everything and nothing. He knew everything about science, and nothing at all about life. Hence his inflexibility. His eyes were bandaged like Homer's Themis. He had the blind certainty of the arrow, which sees only the mark and flies to it. In a revolution, nothing is more terrible than a straight line. Cimourdain went straight ahead, as sure as fate.
Cimourdain believed that, in social geneses, the extreme point is the solid earth; an error peculiar to minds which replace reason with logic.

Victor Hugo
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie its pleasure.

Victor Hugo
To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil.

Victor Hugo
I represent a party which does not yet exist: the party of revolution, civilization. This party will make the twentieth century. There will issue from it first the United States of Europe, then the United States of the World.

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
Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

Victor Hugo
A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas. A day will come when the bullets and bombs are replaced by votes.

Victor Hugo
Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers. Take the cable thread by thread, take separately all the little determining motives, you break them one after another, and you say: that is all! Wind them and twist them together, they become an enormity.

Victor Hugo