Victor Hugo Quotes

452 Sourced Quotes

I'd like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know. It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.

Victor Hugo
Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.

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

Victor Hugo
A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.

Victor Hugo
A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.

Victor Hugo
I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.

Victor Hugo
It is very fortunate that kings cannot err. Hence their contradictions never perplex us.

Victor Hugo
Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.

Victor Hugo
Remembrance of the dead soon fades. Alas! in their tombs, they decay more slowly than in our hearts.

Victor Hugo
Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

Victor Hugo
He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

Victor Hugo
We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

Victor Hugo
God put in man thought; society, action; Nature, revery.

Victor Hugo
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil. To think is to do.

Victor Hugo
Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.

Victor Hugo
Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.

Victor Hugo
Laughter is the sun which drives winter from the human face.

Victor Hugo
You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman.

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
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