Top 500 Victor Hugo Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Loving is almost a substitute for thinking. Love is a burning forgetfulness of all other things. How shall we ask passion to be logical?”

— Victor Hugo

402. “Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.”

— Victor Hugo

403. “The owl goes not into the nest of the lark.”

— Victor Hugo

404. “The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.”

— Victor Hugo

405. “As we have explained, in first love the soul is taken long before the body; later the body is taken long before the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all.”

— Victor Hugo

406. “But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God’s fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.”

— Victor Hugo

407. “She was sad with an obscure sadness of which she had not the secret herself. There was in her whole person the stupor of a life ended but never commenced.”

— Victor Hugo

408. “For dogs we kings should have lions, and for cats, tigers. The great benefits a crown.”

— Victor Hugo

409. “The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.”

— Victor Hugo

410. “The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow.”

— Victor Hugo

411. “The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.”

— Victor Hugo

412. “Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibres.”

— Victor Hugo

413. “Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.”

— Victor Hugo

414. “The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests upon anything but what is elevated and great.”

— Victor Hugo

415. “Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.”

— Victor Hugo

416. “He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality.”

— Victor Hugo

417. “Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem. They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it. The.”

— Victor Hugo

418. “Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.”

— Victor Hugo

419. “Notre-Dame de Paris is, in particular, a curious specimen of this variety. Each face, each stone of the venerable monument, is a page not only of the history of the country, but of the history of science and art as well.”

— Victor Hugo

420. “There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.”

— Victor Hugo

421. “The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.”

— Victor Hugo

422. “Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.”

— Victor Hugo

423. “Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.”

— Victor Hugo

424. “In the animal world no creature born to be a dove turns into a scavenger. This happens only among men.”

— Victor Hugo

425. “Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.”

— Victor Hugo

426. “In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D – – He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D – – since 1806.”

— Victor Hugo

427. “The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.”

— Victor Hugo

428. “Love resembles a tree: it bends under its own weight, deeply rooted in our being and sometimes turns green in the ruins of a heart.”

— Victor Hugo

429. “The infinite is. He is there. If the infinite had no person, person would be without limit; it would not be infinite; in other words, it would not exist. There is, then, an I. That I of the infinite is God.”

— Victor Hugo

430. “To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.”

— Victor Hugo

431. “The delight we inspire in others has this enchanting peculiarity that, far from being diminished like every other reflection, it returns to us more radiant than ever.”

— Victor Hugo

432. “Popularity? It’s glory’s small change.”

— Victor Hugo

433. “Crime is redeemed by remorse, but not by a blow of the axe or slipknot. Blood has to be washed by tears but not by blood.”

— Victor Hugo

434. “And must I now begin to doubt – who never doubted all these years? My heart is stone, and still it trembles. The world I have known is lost in the shadows. Is he from heaven or from hell? And does he know, that granting me my life today, this man has killed me, even so. – Javert.”

— Victor Hugo

435. “He who is not master of his own thoughts is not accountable for his own deeds.”

— Victor Hugo

436. “The most beautiful of altars, he said, is the soul of an unhappy creature consoled and thankfing God.”

— Victor Hugo

437. “This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.”

— Victor Hugo

438. “Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.”

— Victor Hugo

439. “Happy, even in the midst of anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness! He who has not viewed the things of this world and the heart of man under this double light has seen nothing and knows nothing of the true.”

— Victor Hugo

440. “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

441. “A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.”

— Victor Hugo

442. “All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word ‘no.’ To ‘no’ there is only one answer and that is ’yes.”

— Victor Hugo

443. “Emotion is always new and the word has always served; therein lies the difficulty of expressing emotion.”

— Victor Hugo

444. “Who among us has not sought peace in a song?”

— Victor Hugo

445. “Seeing so much poverty everywhere makes me think that God is not rich. He gives the appearance of it, but I suspect some financial difficulties.”

— Victor Hugo

446. “We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.”

— Victor Hugo

447. “Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.”

— Victor Hugo

448. “As with stomachs, we should pity minds that do not eat.”

— Victor Hugo

449. “Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.”

— Victor Hugo

450. “It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblences to merit.”

— Victor Hugo