Top 500 Victor Hugo Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.”

— Victor Hugo

252. “The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.”

— Victor Hugo

253. “No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.”

— Victor Hugo

254. “Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.”

— Victor Hugo

255. “Everything speaks: the flowing airstream and the sailing halycon, the blade of grass, the flower, the bud, the element; did you imagine the universe to be otherwise?”

— Victor Hugo

256. “You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.”

— Victor Hugo

257. “Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.”

— Victor Hugo

258. “Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything.”

— Victor Hugo

259. “If I were Jesus Christ, I would save Judas.”

— Victor Hugo

260. “Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.”

— Victor Hugo

261. “A war between Europeans is a civil war.”

— Victor Hugo

262. “Friend is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never.”

— Victor Hugo

263. “Inanimate objects sometimes appear endowed with a strange power of sight. A statue notices, a tower watches, the face of an edifice contemplates.”

— Victor Hugo

264. “Everything bows to success, even grammar.”

— Victor Hugo

265. “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

266. “It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

268. “Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.”

— Victor Hugo

269. “The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.”

— Victor Hugo

270. “True thinkers are characterized by a blending of clearness and mystery.”

— Victor Hugo

271. “To die for lack of love is horrible. The asphyxia of the soul.”

— Victor Hugo

272. “Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.”

— Victor Hugo

273. “This is not my house; it is the house of Jesus Christ. This door does not demand of him who enters whether he has a name, but whether he has a grief. You suffer, you are hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And do not thank me; do not say that I receive you in my house. No one is at home here, except the man who needs a refuge. I say to you, who are passing by, that you are much more at home here than I am myself.”

— Victor Hugo

274. “Here we stop. On the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, a finger to his lips.”

— Victor Hugo

275. “Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact. And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.”

— Victor Hugo

276. “The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation’s effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius...”

— Victor Hugo

277. “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

278. “Something new was entering his soul. Jean Valjean had never loved anything... But, as he was fifty-five and Cosette was only eight, all the love he might have felt through his whole life melted into a sort of ineffable glow. This was the second white vision he had met. The bishop had caused the dawn of virtue on his horizon; Cosette had invoked the dawn of love.”

— Victor Hugo

279. “Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.”

— Victor Hugo

280. “Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.”

— Victor Hugo

281. “The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.”

— Victor Hugo

282. “No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.”

— Victor Hugo

283. “People weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them.”

— Victor Hugo

284. “There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust war.”

— Victor Hugo

285. “There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.”

— Victor Hugo

286. “They say love is blindness of heart; I say not to love is blindness.”

— Victor Hugo

287. “The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being.”

— Victor Hugo

288. “Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.”

— Victor Hugo

289. “The most ferocious animals are disarmed by caresses to their young.”

— Victor Hugo

290. “When the heart is dry the eye is dry.”

— Victor Hugo

291. “I like the laughter that opens the lips and the heart, shows at the same time the pearls and the soul.”

— Victor Hugo

292. “Where women are honored, the divinities are pleased. Where they are despised, it is useless to pray to God.”

— Victor Hugo

293. “The author creates a book and the people accept or not accept it. The creator of a book is an author and the creator of it’s fate are people.”

— Victor Hugo

294. “To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.”

— Victor Hugo

295. “If God had intended that man should go backward, he would have given him eyes in the back of his head.”

— Victor Hugo

296. “Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.”

— Victor Hugo

297. “Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls.”

— Victor Hugo

298. “How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.”

— Victor Hugo

299. “Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.”

— Victor Hugo

300. “A wretched woman is more unfortunate than a wretched man.”

— Victor Hugo