Top 500 Victor Hugo Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.”

— Victor Hugo

102. “Ce n’est rien de mourir, C’est affreux de ne pas vivre.”

— Victor Hugo

103. “Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.”

— Victor Hugo

104. “Let us sacrifice one day to gain perhaps a whole life.”

— Victor Hugo

105. “Religion, Society, and Nature – these are the three struggles of man.”

— Victor Hugo

106. “Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart; I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets, and the roses, as at twenty years ago.”

— Victor Hugo

107. “Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.”

— Victor Hugo

108. “Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.”

— Victor Hugo

109. “If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it’s a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.”

— Victor Hugo

110. “If suffer we must, let’s suffer on the heights.”

— Victor Hugo

111. “A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.”

— Victor Hugo

112. “Death belongs to God alone; by what right do men touch that unknown thing?”

— Victor Hugo

113. “All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.”

— Victor Hugo

114. “Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.”

— Victor Hugo

115. “If people did not love one another, I really don’t see what use there would be in having any spring.”

— Victor Hugo

116. “Toleration is the best religion.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

118. “The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.”

— Victor Hugo

119. “My revenge is fraternity! No more frontiers! The Rhine for everyone! Let us be the same Republic, let us be the United States of Europe, let us be the continental federation, let us be European liberty, let us be universal peace!”

— Victor Hugo

120. “He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.”

— Victor Hugo

121. “Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows.”

— Victor Hugo

122. “We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.”

— Victor Hugo

123. “Taste is the common sense of genius.”

— Victor Hugo

124. “The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.”

— Victor Hugo

125. “Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.”

— Victor Hugo

126. “Inspiration and genius -one and the same.”

— Victor Hugo

127. “An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

129. “I think, therefore I doubt.”

— Victor Hugo

130. “Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?”

— Victor Hugo

131. “What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.”

— Victor Hugo

132. “A house is built of logs and stone, of tiles and posts and piers; a home is built of loving deeds that stand a thousand years.”

— Victor Hugo

133. “God made only water, but man made wine.”

— Victor Hugo

134. “Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it – there is a certain shameful solidarity.”

— Victor Hugo

135. “Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.”

— Victor Hugo

136. “Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood.”

— Victor Hugo

137. “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”

— Victor Hugo

138. “If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes of the old, you see light.”

— Victor Hugo

139. “Sacrificing the earth for paradise is giving up the substance for the shadow.”

— Victor Hugo

140. “A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.”

— Victor Hugo

141. “Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”

— Victor Hugo

142. “Those who live are those who fight.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

144. “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

145. “Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.”

— Victor Hugo

146. “What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.”

— Victor Hugo

147. “The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.”

— Victor Hugo

148. “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

149. “Love is reducing the universe to one being.”

— Victor Hugo

150. “Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.”

— Victor Hugo