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)
The true paradise is the paradise we have lost.
To be good is to be in harmony with oneself.
The human heart is a labyrinth of passions.
Life is a flower of which love is the honey.
The soul is a mirror of the universe.
The earth is a great soul.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
The word 'glory' is a beautiful word, but 'liberty' is a more beautiful word still.
The future has several names. For the weak, it is the impossible; for the fainthearted, it is the unknown; for the thoughtful and the valiant, it is the ideal.
The greatest crimes are not committed by the people who break the law, but by the people who make the law.
The mind is a strange thing. It works in secret, and it works in silence.
There are no bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.
The soul of the wicked is a hell.
The rich man's son is not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but with a golden spoon in his hand.
Society is a veil. It is a mask. It is a lie.
Every man has within him a world of his own.
The poor man's son is not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but with a wooden spoon in his hand.
The soul of the wicked is a hell, and the soul of the good is a heaven.
The greatest revolution is not to be found in the streets, but in the heart.
Contemporaries of Victor Hugo
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Victor Hugo (1802–1885).