Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Victor Hugo Statesman

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: France
  • Born: Feb 26, 1802
  • Died: May 22, 1885

Victor Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best known French writers. In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem. Outside France, his best-known works are the acclaimed novels Les Misérables, 1862, and Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831. He also produced more than 4,000 drawings, which have since been admired for their beauty, and earned widespread respect as a campaigner for social causes such as the abolition of the death penalty.

Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism; his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. He was buried in the Panthéon. His legacy has been honored in many ways, including his portrait being placed on francs.

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

The ideal and the beautiful are identical the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form hence idea and substance are cognate.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

People do not lack strength they lack will.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

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

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

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

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

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

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

I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.

To love beauty is to see light.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Forty is the old age of youth fifty the youth of old age.

I'm religiously opposed to religion.

The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.

Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

Toleration is the best religion.

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

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

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

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

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

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

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

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

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.

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

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

A library implies an act of faith.

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

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity in a girl boldness.

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.

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

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

Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

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

Change your opinions, keep to your principles change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.

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

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

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

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

To think is of itself to be useful it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.

Conscience is God present in man.

Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

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.

Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

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

To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

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