V

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 think is of itself to be useful it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.”

— Victor Hugo

God

All Quotes by Victor Hugo

“Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.”

— Victor Hugo

Smile

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

— Victor Hugo

Great

“Change your opinions, keep to your principles change your leaves, keep intact your roots.”

— Victor Hugo

Change

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”

— Victor Hugo

God

“The three great problems of this century the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.”

— Victor Hugo

Great

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

— Victor Hugo

Imagination

“There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.”

— Victor Hugo

Great

“The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity in a girl boldness.”

— Victor Hugo

Love

“A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.”

— Victor Hugo

Faith

“The ideal and the beautiful are identical the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form hence idea and substance are cognate.”

— Victor Hugo

Beauty

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”

— Victor Hugo

Music

“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

Women

“What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.”

— Victor Hugo

Beauty

“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

“A library implies an act of faith.”

— Victor Hugo

Faith

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

— Victor Hugo

Happiness

“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

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

— Victor Hugo

Time

“Conscience is God present in man.”

— Victor Hugo

God

“He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.”

— Victor Hugo

Morning