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 sea is the enormous image of the sublime.
History has its truth, and so has legend.
The child’s murmuring is more and better than the words of the strongest.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
Tears are the water of life.
The ideal and the real are but different names for the same thing.
Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible.
The universe is the book of the world.
Love is a fault; so be it. Hugo's works will be faulted too.
The pen is the sword of the mind.
Death is the vestibule of life.
I am not a man, I am a storm.
The last day of a life is always the first day of another.
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.
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!
The word 'love' is a verb. Love is an action word.
The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
Popularity is the applause of the world. Glory is the applause of heaven.
The greatest acts are not the ones that make the most noise.
Contemporaries of Victor Hugo
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Victor Hugo (1802–1885).