Victor Hugo
Les Misérables, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Most quoted
"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness."
— from Letter to Juliette Drouet
"The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings fell in love because they looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only."
— from Les Misérables, 1862
"When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, they have found the secret of life; they are no longer anything but the two boundaries of the same ideal; they are no longer anything but two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar!"
— from Les Misérables, 1862
All quotes by Victor Hugo (260)
To love another person is to see the face of God.
Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.
Forty years is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
The future has several names. For the weak, it is the impossible. For the fainthearted, it is the unknown. For the thoughtful and valiant, it is the ideal.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings; it is supported by them.
The word 'love' is so important in the Bible. It is the first word that God speaks to man.
Change your opinions, keep your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
Conscience is God present in man.
The beautiful is as useful as the useful.
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?
No army can stop an idea whose time has come.
The greatest strength of a man is his gentleness.
Life is a voyage, and the soul is the pilot.
Contemporaries of Victor Hugo
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Victor Hugo (1802–1885).