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Victor Hugo

85 quotes

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist widely considered one of the greatest French writers. His best-known works — *Les Misérables* and *The Hunchback of Notre-Dame* — are enduring classics that blend sweeping narrative with powerful social conscience. Hugo was also an outspoken advocate for social justice and human rights.

“To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.”

— Victor Hugo

Happiness

All Quotes by Victor Hugo

“Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.”

— Victor Hugo

God

“Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

— Victor Hugo

Time

“The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.”

— Victor Hugo

Poetry

“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”

— Victor Hugo

Future

“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”

— Victor Hugo

Attitude

“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”

— Victor Hugo

Happiness

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

— Victor Hugo

Poetry

“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

Art

“Toleration is the best religion.”

— Victor Hugo

Best

“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

Art

“Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.”

— Victor Hugo

Beauty

“Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.”

— Victor Hugo

Love

“To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.”

— Victor Hugo

Happiness

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

— Victor Hugo

God

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

— Victor Hugo

Great

“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

Architecture

“People do not lack strength they lack will.”

— Victor Hugo

Strength

“To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.”

— Victor Hugo

Thanksgiving

“The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.”

— Victor Hugo

Men

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

— Victor Hugo

Time