Top 500 Victor Hugo Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “The most ferocious animals are disarmed by caresses to their young.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

305. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

306. “Press on! A better fate awaits thee.”

— Victor Hugo

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

310. “Night and the day, when united, Bring forth the beautiful light.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

312. “Women are more credulous than men.”

— Victor Hugo

313. “Happiness wishes everybody happy.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

315. “The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.”

— Victor Hugo

316. “My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should liked to be wholly a beast like that goat. – Quasimodo.”

— Victor Hugo

317. “The ox suffers, the cart complains.”

— Victor Hugo

318. “The truth of an upright man must be accepted on his own terms. Moreover, since natures vary, we must agree that all the beauties of human excellence may be fostered by faiths that we do not share.”

— Victor Hugo

319. “Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.”

— Victor Hugo

320. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

330. “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

331. “I was dying when you came.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

334. “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

335. “Art needs no spur beyond itself.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

343. “This will destroy that. The book will kill the edifice.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

346. “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

347. “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

348. “No religion but blasphemes a little.”

— Victor Hugo

349. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

Featured in: Book Quotes