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)
When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
The mind, like the body, can endure only a certain amount of strain.
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
The stomach is a good master, but a bad servant.
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands.
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
The degradation of the citizen involves the degradation of the man; and the degradation of the man involves the degradation of the citizen.
A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
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 have fallen in love because they have looked at each other.
To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.
The human race is a bird and it must not be caged.
The ocean is a vast desert where men are never alone, for they feel the tremor of infinity on every hand.
A writer is a world trapped in a person.
The soul helps the body, and at certain moments uplifts it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.
The eye of the mind sees not so well when the eye of the body is out of its focus.
The ideal and the real—nature is both. The outside reaches as far as the inside.
The book one reads must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.
The precipice is the friend of the summit.
To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.
Contemporaries of Victor Hugo
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Victor Hugo (1802–1885).