Top 500 Victor Hugo Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Happiness wishes everybody happy.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

304. “Women are more credulous than men.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

307. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

309. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

318. “I was dying when you came.”

— Victor Hugo

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

322. “Art needs no spur beyond itself.”

— Victor Hugo

323. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

331. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

335. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

337. “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

338. “No religion but blasphemes a little.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

341. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

343. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

345. “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

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo