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.

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

Conscience is God present in man.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

A library implies an act of faith.

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

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

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

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

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

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

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

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.

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

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

Toleration is the best religion.

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

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

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

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

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

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

I'm religiously opposed to religion.

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

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

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

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

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

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

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

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

To love beauty is to see light.

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.

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

People do not lack strength they lack will.

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

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

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

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

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

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.

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