Victor Hugo Quotes

452 Sourced Quotes

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
These two beings, who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching a love, and who had lived so long for each other, were now suffering beside one another and through one another; without speaking of it, without harsh feeling, and smiling all the while.

Victor Hugo
In every French village there is now a lighted torch, the schoolmaster; and a mouth trying to blow it out, the priest.

Victor Hugo
One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.

Victor Hugo
Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.

Victor Hugo
A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.

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
Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right.

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
One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. In the case of the sailor, this is called a tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse.

Victor Hugo
The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.

Victor Hugo
There are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.

Victor Hugo
It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.

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
To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.

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
A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.

Victor Hugo