Top 500 Victor Hugo Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There is in every village a torch – the teacher; and an extinguisher – the priest.”

— Victor Hugo

52. “To contemplate is to look at shadows.”

— Victor Hugo

53. “God has made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger.”

— Victor Hugo

54. “The malicious have a dark happiness.”

— Victor Hugo

55. “When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.”

— Victor Hugo

56. “Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.”

— Victor Hugo

57. “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

58. “To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

60. “Love is like a tree, it grows of its own accord, it puts down deep roots into our whole being.”

— Victor Hugo

61. “The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.”

— Victor Hugo

62. “The left-handed are precious; they take places which are inconvenient for the rest.”

— Victor Hugo

63. “The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.”

— Victor Hugo

64. “You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea.”

— Victor Hugo

65. “You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.”

— Victor Hugo

66. “There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

69. “Our mind is enriched by what we receive, our heart by what we give.”

— Victor Hugo

70. “The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.”

— Victor Hugo

71. “Freedom begins where it ends ignorance.”

— Victor Hugo

72. “To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!”

— Victor Hugo

73. “There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.”

— Victor Hugo

74. “If you don’t build castles in the air you won’t build anything on the ground.”

— Victor Hugo

75. “If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.”

— Victor Hugo

76. “To know, to think, to dream. That is everything.”

— Victor Hugo

77. “Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.”

— Victor Hugo

78. “The sewer is the conscience of the city.”

— Victor Hugo

79. “Woman, nude, is the blue sky. Clouds and garments are an obstacle to contemplation. Beauty and infinity would be gazed upon unveiled.”

— Victor Hugo

80. “There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering – a hell of boredom.”

— Victor Hugo

81. “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”

— Victor Hugo

82. “The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness.”

— Victor Hugo

83. “The first symptom of true love in a man is timidity, in a young woman, boldness. This is surprising, and yet nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming each the other’s qualities.”

— Victor Hugo

84. “Nothing is more true, more real, than the primeval magnetic disturbances that two souls may communicate to one another, through the tiny sparks of a moment’s glance.”

— Victor Hugo

85. “Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.”

— Victor Hugo

86. “Excitement is not enjoyment: in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped, not bolted at a swallow.”

— Victor Hugo

87. “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

88. “Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.”

— Victor Hugo

89. “Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.”

— Victor Hugo

90. “When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.”

— Victor Hugo

91. “I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.”

— Victor Hugo

92. “Animals run no risk of going to hell. They are already there.”

— Victor Hugo

93. “So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.”

— Victor Hugo

94. “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

95. “Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.”

— Victor Hugo

96. “He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends.”

— Victor Hugo

97. “Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.”

— Victor Hugo

98. “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”

— Victor Hugo

99. “He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”

— Victor Hugo

100. “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.”

— Victor Hugo