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)
Do not mistake a tomb for a monument.
Progress is the goal, death is the issue.
The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is from the ideal that it takes its form.
I am a soul. I am able to understand another soul.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
The first symptom of true love in a young man's heart is timidity.
Society is a republic. When an individual endeavors to lift himself above his fellows, he is dragged down by the mass.
Wisdom is the true philosophy.
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
Persevere and preserve yourself for a nobler destiny.
There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.
The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from the poitrinaire which he was, he has made the powerful and terrible Jean Valjean.
To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further.
Liberty is the right to do whatever the law permits.
The theatre is the book of the people.
One is not a soldier until one has been in the presence of the enemy.
The owl goes to the wood and the lark to the dawn.
Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.
The infinite is. It is there. If infinity does not exist, it would have to be invented.
Prayer is the elevation of the mind on high.
Contemporaries of Victor Hugo
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Victor Hugo (1802–1885).