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.

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

— Victor Hugo

Time

All Quotes by Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

Truth

“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

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

— Victor Hugo

Education

“When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.”

— Victor Hugo

God

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

— Victor Hugo

Happiness

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

— Victor Hugo

Future

“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

“Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.”

— Victor Hugo

Men

“Toleration is the best religion.”

— Victor Hugo

Best

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

— Victor Hugo

Beauty

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

— Victor Hugo

Power

“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

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

— Victor Hugo

Smile

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

— Victor Hugo

Future

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

— Victor Hugo

Beauty

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

— Victor Hugo

Great

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

— Victor Hugo

Men

“Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.”

— Victor Hugo

God

“Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.”

— Victor Hugo

Good

“There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.”

— Victor Hugo

Love