Victor Hugo Quotes

“Progress is man’s mode of existence. The general life of the human race is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called Progress. Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“have”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“there is a point where the unfortunate and the infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, a fatal word, the miserable; whose fault is this?”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“We are making history here.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“I do not know whether I no longer understand French, or whether you no longer speak it; but the fact is that I do not understand.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“have just observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“Later, when we no longer there, we find those streets are very dear to us, we miss the roofs, Windows, and doors, that the walls are essential to us, that trees are beloved, that every day we did enter those houses we never entered, and we have left something of our affections, our life and heart on those paving stones.”
― Victor Hugo, The Complete Novels: Les Misérables, Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Hans of Iceland, Last Day of a Condemned Man, Man Who Laughs, Ninety-Three, A Fight with a Cannon…

“They convert a poor camel-driver into a Mahomet; a peasant girl tending her goats into a Joan of Arc. Solitude generates a certain amount of sublime exaltation.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“Now water, cast upon the ground, is known to make a shape like that of devils.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a garment which had once been white, and around her neck was to be seen a string of adrézarach beads with a little silk bag ornamented with green glass, which was open and empty. These objects were of so little value that the executioner had probably not cared for them. The other, which held this one in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his shoulder blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had come thither and had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“They upheld everything till the day when they overthrew everything. Their instinct was to give a decisive push to everything that tottered. In their eyes, as they had been brought into service on condition that there should be solidity, to waver was to betray them. They were numbers, they were force, they were fear. Hence the daring of baseness.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, He lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, As the night comes when day is gone. a”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“Revolt is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which forms suddenly in certain conditions of temperature, and which, as it eddies about, mounts, descends, thunders, tears, razes, crushes, demolishes, uproots, bearing with it great natures and small, the strong man and the feeble mind, the tree trunk and the stalk of straw.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“Nature is pitiless; she will not consent to withdraw her flowers, her music, her perfumes and her sunbeams from before the face of human abomination; she overwhelms man with the contrast between divine beauty and the ugliness of society; she spares him neither the wing of a butterfly, nor the song of a bird; in the midst of murder, in the midst of vengeance, in the midst of barbarity he must submit to the sight of holy things; he cannot get away from the vast reproach of the universal sweetness and the implacable serenity of the blue sky. The deformity of human laws must be exposed in their nakedness, in the midst of the dazzling beauty of the eternal. Man breaks and crushes, man destroys, man kills; the summer is summer still, the lily is the lily still, the stars of heaven are the stars of heaven still.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“This: one thing prevented me from seeing any other; a good action, seen too near, concealed a hundred criminal actions from my eyes; on one side an old man, on the other, children, all this came between me and duty. I forgot the villages burned, the fields ravaged, the prisoners massacred, the wounded murdered, the women shot. I forgot France betrayed to England; I liberated the murderer of his country. I am guilty. In speaking thus, I seem to speak against myself; it is a mistake. I am speaking for myself. When the guilty person confesses his fault, he saves the only thing worth the trouble of saving—honor.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“It may seem amazing that these men, in the habit of exposing their lives every day in their expeditions over the glaciers in pursuit of wild beasts, should lose heart so soon; but let no one forget that in vulgar hearts courage is purely local. A man may laugh at shot and shell, and shiver in the dark or on the edge of a precipice; a man may face fierce animals daily, leap across fearful abysses, and yet run from a volley of artillery. Fearlessness is often only a habit; and one who has ceased to fear death under certain forms dreads it none the less.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“The sky was dark; a tempestuous light ever and anon appeared in the clouds as if through a veil of crape and then vanished; a cold wind swept across the plain. The young man scarcely heeded these signs of an immediate and violent storm; and besides, even could he have found shelter from the tempest and a place to rest from his fatigues, could he have found a spot where he might avoid his misery or rest from thought?”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“The poor fugitive had exchanged his reindeer-skin garments for a full suit of black, left at the Spladgest by a famous Throndhjem grammarian, who drowned himself in despair because he could not find out why “Jupiter” changed to “Jovis” in the genitive.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels

“The wretched woman wept, not because she had been deceived, but because her eyes were no longer blinded — tears of regret, but not of repentance; therefore her tears afforded her no relief.”
― Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels