Victor Hugo quotes

Born
26 February 1802 Besançon, Doubs, France.

Died
22 May 1885.

Occupation
Author.

Victor Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. Hugo is considered to be one of the greatest and best-known French writers.

To think of shadows is a serious thing.
– Victor Hugo

A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
– Victor Hugo

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
– Victor Hugo

Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.
– Victor Hugo

I would have liked to be – indeed, I should have been – a second Rembrandt.
– Victor Hugo

It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.
– Victor Hugo

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
– Victor Hugo

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
– Victor Hugo

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
– Victor Hugo

The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
– Victor Hugo

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
– Victor Hugo

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

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
– Victor Hugo

Conscience is God present in man.
– Victor Hugo

A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.
– Victor Hugo

Because one doesn’t like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
– Victor Hugo

Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.
– Victor Hugo

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
– Victor Hugo

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
– Victor Hugo

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
– Victor Hugo

Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.
– Victor Hugo

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
– Victor Hugo

To love is to act.
– Victor Hugo

Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
– Victor Hugo

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
– Victor Hugo

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.
– Victor Hugo

To love another person is to see the face of God.
– Victor Hugo

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

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
– Victor Hugo

Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.
– Victor Hugo

Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
– Victor Hugo

Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.
– Victor Hugo

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
– Victor Hugo

The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
– 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

There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
– Victor Hugo

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
– Victor Hugo

Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
– Victor Hugo

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
– 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

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
– Victor Hugo

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
– Victor Hugo

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

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
– Victor Hugo

I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!
– Victor Hugo

Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.
– Victor Hugo

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
– Victor Hugo