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.

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

— Victor Hugo

Great

All Quotes by Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

Happiness

“Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”

— Victor Hugo

Time

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

— Victor Hugo

God

“I'm religiously opposed to religion.”

— Victor Hugo

Religion

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

— Victor Hugo

Happiness

“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

— Victor Hugo

Power

“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”

— Victor Hugo

Life

“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”

— Victor Hugo

Education

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

— Victor Hugo

Great

“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

“What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.”

— Victor Hugo

Future

“Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.”

— Victor Hugo

Peace

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.”

— Victor Hugo

Courage

“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

“Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.”

— Victor Hugo

Good

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

— Victor Hugo

Music

“Forty is the old age of youth fifty the youth of old age.”

— Victor Hugo

Age

“Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.”

— Victor Hugo

Smile

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

— Victor Hugo

Time

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

— Victor Hugo

Time