Top 500 Victor Hugo Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!”

— Victor Hugo

302. “And do you know Monsieur Marius? I believe I was a little in love with you.”

— Victor Hugo

303. “Women are more credulous than men.”

— Victor Hugo

304. “For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud – and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule – that everything that exists in nature exists in art.”

— Victor Hugo

305. “A day will come when markets, open to trade, and minds, open to ideas, will become the sole battlefield.”

— Victor Hugo

306. “Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.”

— Victor Hugo

307. “He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.”

— Victor Hugo

308. “I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.”

— Victor Hugo

309. “To pay compliments to the one we love is the first method of caressing, a demi-audacity venturing. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.”

— Victor Hugo

310. “Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.”

— Victor Hugo

311. “I was dying when you came.”

— Victor Hugo

312. “Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.”

— Victor Hugo

313. “Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.”

— Victor Hugo

314. “I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!”

— Victor Hugo

315. “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”

— Victor Hugo

316. “Art needs no spur beyond itself.”

— Victor Hugo

317. “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

318. “Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.”

— Victor Hugo

319. “Men are still men. The despot’s wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power’s excess, – Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs.”

— Victor Hugo

320. “Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.”

— Victor Hugo

321. “It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory.”

— Victor Hugo

322. “My fellow, you strike me at present as being situated in the moon, kingdom of dream, province of illusion, capital: Soap-Bubble.”

— Victor Hugo

323. “Wisdom is the health of the soul.”

— Victor Hugo

324. “The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real.”

— Victor Hugo

325. “We are in the hands of those gods, those monsters, those giants: our thoughts.”

— Victor Hugo

326. “There are many lovely women, but no perfect ones.”

— Victor Hugo

327. “If the infinite had no me, then me would be its limit. It would not be the infinite, therefore it would not be.”

— Victor Hugo

328. “A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. There is a person who, departing, took away the sun.”

— Victor Hugo

329. “No religion but blasphemes a little.”

— Victor Hugo

330. “We are not loved by our friends for what we are; rather, we are loved in spite of what we are.”

— Victor Hugo

331. “A phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer; that is as simple as the law of the complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man...”

— Victor Hugo

332. “Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions.”

— Victor Hugo

333. “Progress is not accomplished in one stage.”

— Victor Hugo

334. “Humanity is identity. All men are the same clay. No difference, here below at least, in predestination. The same darkness before, the same flesh during, the same ashes after life. But ignorance, mixed with the human composition, blackens it. This incurable ignorance possesses the heart of man, and there becomes evil.”

— Victor Hugo

335. “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”

— Victor Hugo

336. “From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.”

— Victor Hugo

337. “France lost a great novel last night.”

— Victor Hugo

338. “It is those books which a man possesses but does not read which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him.”

— Victor Hugo

339. “To love, or to have loved, – this suffices. Demand nothing more. There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is a fulfilment.”

— Victor Hugo

340. “A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.”

— Victor Hugo

341. “France is great because she is France.”

— Victor Hugo

342. “A great artist is a great man in a great child.”

— Victor Hugo

343. “When two mouths, made sacred by love, draw near to each other to create, it is impossible, that above that ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill in the immense mystery of the stars.”

— Victor Hugo

344. “God blesses man, not for having found but for having sought.”

— Victor Hugo

345. “Too much improvisation leaves the mind stupidly void.”

— Victor Hugo

346. “Despotism is a long crime.”

— Victor Hugo

347. “The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.”

— Victor Hugo

348. “Let the one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and let them both imagine that they are fighting for the country; the strife will be colossal.”

— Victor Hugo

349. “The slightest contact with logic makes all false arguments disintegrate.”

— Victor Hugo

350. “This is a leviathan I am about to ship out to sea...”

— Victor Hugo