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 forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.
The greatest strength is gentleness.
Art is the absolute, the divine, the eternal.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
To be human is to be a paradox.
Love is a mystery. It is a light that shines in the darkness.
The greatest good is the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Forty years ago, the world was at war. Today, it is at peace. This is the work of Europe.
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
The mind is a strange thing. It works in secret, and it is only when the work is done that it reveals itself.
The greatest crimes are not those that are committed, but those that are permitted.
Change your opinions, keep your principles; change your leaves, keep your roots.
The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.
The word 'love' is not a verb. It's a noun. It's a feeling. It's a state of being.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
The greatest strength of a man is his heart.
The human heart has a built-in mechanism that makes it capable of loving more than it can hold.
Life is a journey, and if you fall in love with the journey, you will be in love forever.
The rich man's son can go to school, but the poor man's son must go to work.
The soul is a garden where good and evil grow.
Contemporaries of Victor Hugo
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Victor Hugo (1802–1885).