Victor Hugo Quotes

Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

~ Victor Hugo

He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.

~ Victor Hugo

Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.

~ Victor Hugo

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

~ Victor Hugo

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

~ Victor Hugo

Toleration is the best religion.

~ Victor Hugo

What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.

~ Victor Hugo

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

~ Victor Hugo

Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.

~ Victor Hugo

To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.

~ Victor Hugo

A library implies an act of faith.

~ Victor Hugo

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

~ Victor Hugo

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

~ Victor Hugo

To love beauty is to see light.

~ Victor Hugo

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

~ Victor Hugo

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

~ Victor Hugo

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

~ Victor Hugo

Habit is the nursery of errors.

~ Victor Hugo

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

~ Victor Hugo

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

~ Victor Hugo

Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

~ Victor Hugo

When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.

~ Victor Hugo

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

~ Victor Hugo

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

~ Victor Hugo

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

~ Victor Hugo

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

~ Victor Hugo

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

~ Victor Hugo

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

~ Victor Hugo

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

~ Victor Hugo

Liberation is not deliverance.

~ Victor Hugo