Victor Hugo Quotes & Sayings

We are drawn to what we lack. No one loves daylight more than a blind man. — Victor Hugo

She was a lovely blonde, with fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on her head, and her pearls were in her mouth. — Victor Hugo

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses. — Victor Hugo

some even affirmed that they had passed the night across the threshold of the great door, in order to make sure that they should be the first to pass in. The crowd — Victor Hugo

Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and lyric. — Victor Hugo

Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. No difference, here below at least, in predestination. The same darkness before, the same flesh during, the same ashes after. But when ignorance is mixed with human dough, it blackens it. This incurable blackness takes over man's insides and there turns into evil ... Destroy the dark hold, Ignorance, and you destroy the mole, Crime. — Victor Hugo

He felt that to increase his knowledge was to strengthen his hatred. Under certain circumstances, instruction and enlightenment may serve as rallying points for evil. — Victor Hugo

When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die. — Victor Hugo

If we wish to be happy, monsieur, we must never comprehend duty; for, as soon as we comprehend it, it is implacable. One would say that it punishes you for comprehending it; but no, it rewards you for it; for it puts you into a hell where you feel God at your side. — Victor Hugo

With the exception of wars of liberation, everything that armies do is by foul means. — Victor Hugo

There are no bad herbs or bad men; there are only bad cultivators. — Victor Hugo

Too much improvisation leaves the mind stupidly void. — Victor Hugo

To paint a battle requires those mighty artists with chaos in their brush — Victor Hugo

Those who are ignorant should be taught all you can teach them; society is to blame for not providing free public education; and society will answer for the obscurity it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sin will be committed. The guilty party is not he who has sinned but he who created the darkness in the first place. — Victor Hugo

He felt as though his brain were on fire. She had come to him, what joy! And then, how she had looked at him! She seemed more beautiful than ever before. Beautiful with a beauty that combined all of the woman with all of the angel, a beauty that would have made Petrarch sing and Dante kneel. He felt as though he were swimming in the deep blue sky. At the same time he was horribly disconcerted, because there was dust on his boots. — Victor Hugo

But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. When they say "no" to progress, it is not the future but themselves that they are condemning. They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are inoculating themselves with the past. There is but one way of rejecting To-morrow, and that is to die. — Victor Hugo

The poor young man must work for his bread; he eats; when he has eaten, he has nothing left but reverie. He enters God's theater free; he sees the sky, space, the stars, the flowers, the children, the humanity in which he suffers, the creation in which he shines. He looks at humanity so much that he sees the soul, he looks at creation so much that he sees God. He dreams, he feels that he is great; he dreams some more, and he feels that he is tender. From the egotism of the suffering man, he passes to the compassion of the contemplating man. A wonderful feeling springs up within him, forgetfulness of self, and pity for all. In thinking of the countless enjoyments nature offers, gives, and gives lavishly to open souls and refuses to closed souls, he, a millionaire of intelligence, comes to grieve for the millionaires of money. All hatred leaves his heart as all light enters his mind. And is he unhappy? No. The poverty of a young man is never miserable. — Victor Hugo

This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls,
what declaimers! — Victor Hugo

In the morning I write love letters and in the afternoon I dig graves — Victor Hugo

I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.
-Claude Frollo — Victor Hugo

The peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had. — Victor Hugo

When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything. — Victor Hugo

What says the law? You will not kill. How does it say it? By killing! — Victor Hugo

Madame Magloire sometimes called him 'Your Highness.' One day, rising from his armchair, he went to his library for a book. It was on one of the upper shelves, and as the bishop was rather short, he could not reach it. 'Madame Magloire,' said he, 'bring me a chair. My highness cannot reach that shelf. — Victor Hugo

Fate, with its mysterious and inexorable patience, was slowly bringing together these two beings charged, like thunder-clouds, with electricity, with the latent forces of passion, and destined to meet and mingle in a look as clouds do in a lightning-flash.

So much has been made in love-stories of the power of a glance that we have ended by undervaluing it. We scarcely dare say in these days that two persons fell in love because their eyes met. Yet that is how one falls in love and in no other way. What remains is simply what remains, and it comes later. Nothing is more real than the shock two beings sustain when that spark flies between them. — Victor Hugo

Death does not concern me. He who takes his first step uses perhaps his last shoes. (Halmalo) — Victor Hugo

Take care of the way in which you turn to the dead. Do not think of that which perishes. Look fixedly, and you will perceive the living light of your beloved dead in heaven. — Victor Hugo

The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being, and the extension of a single being until it reaches God - that is love.
Love is the salute of the angels to the stars.
How sad is the heart when rendered sad by love!
How great is the void created by the absence of the being who alone fills the world. — Victor Hugo

It seemed as though he had for a soul the book of the natural law. — Victor Hugo

To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought, with the infinity on high, is called praying. — Victor Hugo

The persistence of an all-absorbing idea is terrible. — Victor Hugo

Then she looked at Marius, put on a strange expression and said to him, Do you know, Monsieur Marius, you're a very pretty boy? — Victor Hugo

All that he might have felt of love in his entire life melted into a sort of ineffable radiance. — Victor Hugo

I am for religion, against religions. — Victor Hugo

A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze? — Victor Hugo

Houses are like the human beings that inhabit them. — Victor Hugo

By continually going out for reverie, a day comes when you go out to drown yourself. — Victor Hugo

People overwhelmed with trouble do not look behing; they know only too well that misfortune follows them. — Victor Hugo

The sunshine was delightful, the foliage gently astir, more from the activity of birds than from the breeze. One gallant little bird, doubtless lovelorn, was singing his heart out at the top of a tall tree. — Victor Hugo

The void in the heart does not accommodate itself to a proxy. — Victor Hugo

The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral. — Victor Hugo

The past surged up before him facing the present; he compared them and sobbed. The silence of tears once opened, the despairing man writhed.
He felt that he had been stopped short. — Victor Hugo

Excitement is not enjoyment: in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped, not bolted at a swallow. — Victor Hugo

Then live your life, above all things. Make use of your I while you have it. — Victor Hugo

All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world. — Victor Hugo

As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it. — Victor Hugo

The gravedigger's work is charming when done by a child. — 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

Many men have a secret monster in this same manner, a dragon which gnaws them, a despair which inhabits their night. Such a man resembles other men, he goes and comes. No one knows that he bears within him a frightful parasitic pain with a thousand teeth, which lives within the unhappy man, and of which he is dying. No one knows that this man is a gulf. He is stagnant but deep. From time to time, a trouble of which the onlooker understands nothing appears on his surface. A mysterious wrinkle is formed, then vanishes, then re-appears; an air-bubble rises and bursts. It is the breathing of the unknown beast. — Victor Hugo

Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go with it. The useless must be mingled with happiness. Happiness is only the necessary. Season that enormously with the superfluous for me. A palace and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the grand waterworks of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess and try to make her a duchess. Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers, and add a hundred thousand francs income. Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you can see, beneath a marble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also to the fairy spectacle of marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry bread. One eats, but one does not dine. I want the superfluous, the useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose. — Victor Hugo

Creation lives, grows, and multiplies; man is but a witness. — Victor Hugo

The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone. — Victor Hugo

See Monsieur Geborand, buying a pennyworth of paradise. — Victor Hugo

On coming out of the chapel, a well can be seen on the left. There are two in this yard. You ask, Why is there no bucket and no pulley to this one? Because no water is drawn from it now. Why is no more water drawn from it? Because it is full of skeletons. — Victor Hugo

When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud, happy, her heart full to overflowing. Jean — Victor Hugo

The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant. — Victor Hugo

A sewer is a cynic. It tells All. — Victor Hugo

After depositing in her heart one of the two germs which are destined, later on, to fill the whole life of woman, coquetry. Love is the other. — Victor Hugo

The learned man knows that he is ignorant. — Victor Hugo

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

He condemned nothing in haste and without taking circumstances into account. He said, Examine the road over which the fault has passed. — Victor Hugo

Alas! sir," said Gringoire, "I would that I could lend you some, but, my breeches are worn to holes, and 'tis not crowns which have done it. — Victor Hugo

My dear boy, a piece of advice. Read not so many books, and look a little more upon the Peggies. The little rogues are good for thee, O Marius! By continual flight and blushing thou shalt become a brute by Courfeyrac to Marius — Victor Hugo

My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should liked to be wholly a beast like that goat. - Quasimodo — Victor Hugo

You preserve your shame but you kill your glory. — Victor Hugo

While in any other great city the vagabond child is a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of the ocean. — Victor Hugo

For men felt therein the presence of that great human thing which is called law, and that great divine thing which is called justice. — Victor Hugo

evil condoned wears the mask of benevolence — Victor Hugo

Plea Against the Death Penalty
Look, examine, reflect. You hold capital punishment up as an example. Why? Because of what it teaches. And just what is it that you wish to teach by means of this example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach that "thou shalt not kill"? By killing.
I have examined the death penalty under each of its two aspects: as a direct action, and as an indirect one. What does it come down to? Nothing but something horrible and useless, nothing but a way of shedding blood that is called a crime when an individual commits it, but is (sadly) called "justice" when society brings it about. Make no mistake, you lawmakers and judges, in the eyes of God as in those of conscience, what is a crime when individuals do it is no less an offense when society commits the deed. — Victor Hugo

Protect the workers, encourage the rich. — Victor Hugo

They were moments when she was suddenly reminded of her child, and perhaps also of the man she had loved; the breaking of links with the past is a painful thing. — Victor Hugo

As we have just observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness. — Victor Hugo

The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real — Victor Hugo

Skepticism, that dry rot of the intellect. — Victor Hugo

As with stomachs, we should pity minds that do not eat. — Victor Hugo

The memory of an absent being kindles in the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared, the more it beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light on its horizon; the star of the inner night. — Victor Hugo

Loving is half of believing. — Victor Hugo

Darks drifts covered the horizon. A strange shadow approaching nearer and nearer, was spreading little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shadow which came from indignations and from systems. All that had been hurriedly stifled was stirring and fermenting. Sometimes the conscious of the honest man caught its breath, there was so much confusion in that air in which sophisms were mingled with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of the storm. The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance-comer, thought unknown, flashed out. Then the twilight darkness fell again. At intervals, deep and sullen mutterings enabled men to judge of the amount of lightning in the cloud. — Victor Hugo

Owing money was the beginning of slavery ... a creditor was worse than a boss, for a boss only owns your person but a creditor owns your dignity and can slap it around. — Victor Hugo

That you are happy, that Monsieur Pontmercy has Cosette, that youth espouses mourning, that there are about you, my children, lilacs and nightingales, that your life is a beautiful lawn in the sunshine, that all the enchantments of heaven fill your souls, and now, that I who am good for nothing, that I die; surely all this is well. — Victor Hugo

Running beer gathers no foam. — Victor Hugo

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him. — Victor Hugo

Djali trotted along behind them, so overjoyed at seeing Gringoire again that she constantly made him stumble by affectionately putting her horns between his legs. 'That's life,' said the philosopher, each time he narrowly escaped falling flat on his face. 'It's often our best friends who cause our downfall. — Victor Hugo

This very slight change had worked a revolution. — Victor Hugo

The memory of an absent person shines in the deepest recesses of the heart, shining the more brightly the more wholly its object has vanished: a light on the horizon of the despairing, darkened spirit; a star gleaming in our inward night. — Victor Hugo

Initiative is doing the right thing without being told. — Victor Hugo

Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on. — Victor Hugo

No one is more avidly curious about other people's doings than those persons whom they do not concern. — Victor Hugo

One day the air was mild, the Luxembourg was flooded with sun and shade, the sky was as pure as if angels had rinsed it that morning, the sparrows were twittering deep in the chestnut trees, Marius had opened his whole soul to nature, he was not thinking anything, he lived and breathed, he passed close by the bench, the young girl glanced up at him and their eyes met. What was there this time in the young girl's gaze? Marius could not have said. It was nothing and everything. It was a strange lightning flash. She dropped her gaze and he went on his way. — Victor Hugo

Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. — Victor Hugo

He endeavored to collect his thoughts, but did not succeed. At those hours especially when we have sorest need of grasping the sharp realities of life do the threads of though snap off in the brain. — Victor Hugo

There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate. — Victor Hugo

Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded.
Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas, - this is the very struggle of progress. — Victor Hugo

A writer is a world trapped in a person. — Victor Hugo

In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years of age; Claude Frollo, about thirty-six. One had grown up, the other had grown old. — Victor Hugo

Friendship exists outside our modern economy of scarcity ... It's not about apportioning vanishing resources of time and energy. Friendship is a blessed relic of the ancient economy of the gift, and the time freely given to people dear to you actually creates magical abundance. — Victor Hugo

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on earth, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; so long as the three problems of the century - the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labour, the ruin of women by starvation and the atrophy of childhood by physical and spiritual night are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be a need for books such as this. — Victor Hugo

What is this history of Fantine? It is society purchasing a slave. From whom? From misery. From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain. A soul for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts. — Victor Hugo

What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky. — Victor Hugo

Night and the day, when united,
Bring forth the beautiful light. — Victor Hugo