Victor Hugo Quotes

451 Sourced Quotes

A bird sings, a child prattles, but it is the same hymn; hymn indistinct, inarticulate, but full of profound meaning.

Victor Hugo
In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.

Victor Hugo
Symmetry is tedious, and tedium is the very basis of mourning. Despair yawns.

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

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

Victor Hugo
People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.

Victor Hugo
With a tiny bit of effort, the nettle would be useful; if you neglect it, it becomes a pest. So then we kill it. How many men are like nettles My friends, there is no such thing as a weed and no such thing as a bad man. There are only bad cultivators.

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

Victor Hugo
To destroy abuses is not enough; Habits must also be changed. The windmill has gone, but the wind is still there.

Victor Hugo
Music...is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what revery is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.

Victor Hugo
To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.

Victor Hugo
The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.

Victor Hugo
Because of nature's unity it has been concluded that she is simple. An error.

Victor Hugo
You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.

Victor Hugo
He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.

Victor Hugo
Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

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
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
The unexpected ought always to be expected by Science. Her duty is to stop it in its course and search it, rejecting the chimerical, establishing the real.

Victor Hugo
At a certain depth of distress, the poor, in their stupor, groan no longer over evil, and are no longer thankful for good.

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

Victor Hugo
Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic.

Victor Hugo
The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.

Victor Hugo
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

Victor Hugo
For the rest, he was the same to all men, the fashionable world and the ordinary people. He judged nothing in haste, or without taking account of the cirumstances. He said, 'Let me see how the fault arose.

Victor Hugo