Top 500 Victor Hugo Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.”

— Victor Hugo

252. “God became man, granted. The devil became a woman.”

— Victor Hugo

253. “A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.”

— Victor Hugo

254. “To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie.”

— Victor Hugo

255. “Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.”

— Victor Hugo

256. “What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!”

— Victor Hugo

257. “I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

259. “Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

264. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

269. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

271. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

Featured in: Book Quotes

277. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

280. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

288. “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

289. “Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

291. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

300. “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