Best Victor Hugo Quotes

Victor Hugo was a French poet, playwright as well as novelist. He is regarded as one of the finest writes and best known for his Romantic novels and poetry, together with Les Miserables. Below are some of the famous quotes by Victor Hugo.

1. “Loving is half of believing.” - Victor Hugo
2. “Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.” - Victor Hugo
3. “To love another person is to see the face of God.” - Victor Hugo
4. “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.” - Victor Hugo
5. “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather loved in spite of ourselves.” - Victor Hugo
6. “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent Music” - Victor Hugo
7. “I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes — and the stars through his soul.” - Victor Hugo
8. “When a woman is speaking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.” - Victor Hugo
9. “Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.” - Victor Hugo
10. “Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.” - Victor Hugo
11. “Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.” - Victor Hugo
12. “Life is a flower of which love is the honey.” - Victor Hugo
13. “There are fathers who do not love their children, but there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.” - Victor Hugo
14. “Life is a voyage.” - Victor Hugo
15. “A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.” - Victor Hugo
16. “A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.” - Victor Hugo
17. “People do not lack strength; they lack will.” - Victor Hugo
18. “Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.” - Victor Hugo
19. “Those who live are those who fight.” - Victor Hugo
20. “Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.” - Victor Hugo
21. “I’d rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.” - Victor Hugo
22. “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” - Victor Hugo
23. “Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.” - Victor Hugo
24. “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.” - Victor Hugo
25. “Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.” - Victor Hugo
26. “Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.” - Victor Hugo
27. “As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.” - Victor Hugo
28. “Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.” - Victor Hugo
29. “Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.” - Victor Hugo
30. “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved — loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” - Victor Hugo
31. “He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out the plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.” - Victor Hugo
32. “Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.” - Victor Hugo
33. “Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.” - Victor Hugo
34. “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.” - Victor Hugo
35. “He does not weep who does not see.” - Victor Hugo
36. “Have courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones. When you have laboriously accomplished your daily tasks, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.” - Victor Hugo
37. “We are the children of our own deeds.” - Victor Hugo
38. “”Life is the flower for which love is the honey.” “Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.”” - Victor Hugo
39. “No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.” - Victor Hugo
40. “The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.” - Victor Hugo
41. “Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.” - Victor Hugo
42. “A library implies an act of faith.” - Victor Hugo
43. “It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.” - Victor Hugo
44. “There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.” - Victor Hugo
45. “Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.” - Victor Hugo
46. “One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.” - Victor Hugo
47. “Liberation is not deliverance.” - Victor Hugo
48. “The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.” - Victor Hugo
49. “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
50. “For prying into any human affairs, non are equal to those whom it does not concern.” - Victor Hugo
51. “The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.” - Victor Hugo
52. “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
53. “My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.” - Victor Hugo
54. “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
55. “When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.” - Victor Hugo
56. “It is by suffering that human beings become angels.” - Victor Hugo
57. “We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.” - Victor Hugo
58. “Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.” - Victor Hugo
59. “Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter.” - Victor Hugo
60. “Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.” - Victor Hugo
61. “Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.” - Victor Hugo
62. “The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.” - Victor Hugo
63. “There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation” - Victor Hugo
64. “Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?” - Victor Hugo
65. “Progress is the stride of God.” - Victor Hugo
66. “There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.” - Victor Hugo
67. “Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.” - Victor Hugo
68. “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.” - Victor Hugo
69. “Toleration is the best religion.” - Victor Hugo
70. “Most commonly revolt is born of material circumstances; but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Revolt is Masaniello, who led the Neapolitan insurgents in 1647; but insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is a thing of the spirit, revolt is a thing of the stomach.” - Victor Hugo
71. “Popularity? It’s glory’s small change.” - Victor Hugo
72. “We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.” - Victor Hugo
73. “God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.” - Victor Hugo
74. “A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement — in a word, with more renunciation than you care for — and so you flee the contagion.” - Victor Hugo
75. “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

Above were some of the popular quotes by Victor Hugo, we hope that you must have enjoyed reading them. If you have more quotes by Victor Hugo do feel free to share in the comments section.