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 future is a door, the past is a key.
To be loved is to be seen.
The greatest revolution is not to change the world, but to change oneself.
The greatest strength of a nation is its people.
The greatest beauty is the beauty of the soul.
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
When a man is in love, he is not in a condition to be reasonable.
The word 'love' is too often profaned and debased.
The human soul has a greater need of the ideal than of the real.
The wicked are always surprised to find good men in their way.
The more you are in harmony with yourself, the more joyful you are.
Life is a voyage. The ship is not designed to stay in harbor.
The soul's darkest night is not when it is in the dark, but when it is in the light and cannot see.
The mind is a strange thing. It can be a prison or a palace.
The human heart is a labyrinth of contradictions.
To die is nothing; but to live is dreadful.
The rich man's son is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but the poor man's son is born with a shovel in his hand.
The greatest battles are fought in the heart.
The only way to escape the earth is to love it.
The poor man's bread is the rich man's conscience.
Contemporaries of Victor Hugo
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Victor Hugo (1802–1885).