Victor Marie Hugo (1802–85) was a French poet, playwright, literary critic, and writer of religious and political essays. As the undisputed leader of French romanticism (Romantisme,) Hugo wrote such celebrated novels as Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables.
Hugo’s father was one of Napoleon’s generals, and his mother was a traditional royalist. His parents’ political differences were the highlight of Hugo’s childhood and the basis of the lifetime evolution of his allegiance from the empire, to the monarchy, and then to the republic.
In his twenties, Hugo wrote the French Romantic novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of Notre Dame.) Set in 15th century Paris during the reign of Louis XI, it tells a touching story of a gypsy girl named Esmeralda and a deformed and deaf bell-ringer named Quasimodo who loves her. The success of the book in France catapulted Hugo into great renown. He used his celebrity to criticize the autocratic regime of Napoleon III and encourage the French to revolt.
Napoleon III declared Hugo an enemy of the state. In 1851, just before soldiers arrived to arrest him at home, Hugo managed to flee the country in disguise. He lived in exile in Guernsey in the English Channel and wrote Les Châtiments (1853; Castigations,) a volume of aggressive invectives against the emperor.
It was also during his exile that Hugo wrote most of his magnum opus Les Misérables (1865.) Considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, Les Misérables is a profound saga of the endless battle between good and evil. It focuses on Jean Valjean, a poor peasant sentenced to 20 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving sister and her kids. Hugo’s dominant themes of personal transformation, human rights, broken dreams, love, sacrifice, revolution, and redemption made Les Misérables instantly popular upon release.
By the time Hugo died in Paris at age 83, he was a national hero. Two million mourners joined his funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, where he is buried.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Victor Hugo
Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing?
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Death
Reverie, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a natural frontier.
—Victor Hugo
There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Depression
Revolution is the larva of civilization.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Revolution
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties
Progress is the stride of God.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Progress
Most commonly revolt is born of material circumstances; but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Revolt is Masaniello, who led the Neapolitan insurgents in 1647; but insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is a thing of the spirit, revolt is a thing of the stomach.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Revolution
Hypocrisy is nothing, in fact, but a horrible hopefulness.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: One liners, Hypocrisy
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn’t every war fought between men, between brothers?
—Victor Hugo
Topics: War
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Humanity
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Argument, Bitterness, Words
Men are women’s playthings; woman is the devil’s.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Woman
Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Love, Happiness
I’m religiously opposed to religion.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Religion
The first symptom of love in a young man, is timidity; in a girl, it is boldness.—The two sexes have a tendency to approach, and each assumes the qualities of the other.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Love
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Style, Taste
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Planning, Dreams
Shun idleness. It is a rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Laziness, Idleness
Loving is half of believing.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Belief, Faith
Toleration is the best religion.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Acceptance, Tolerance, Religion
A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Debt
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Thoughts, Work, Thinking, Idleness, Laziness
There are fathers who do not love their children, but there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Father, Fathers, Family
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.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Ideal, Ideals
How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, hat the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Kiss
Whenever we encounter the Infinite in man, however imperfectly understood, we treat it with respect. Whether in the synagogue, the mosque, the pagoda, or the wigwam, there is a hideous aspect which we execrate and a sublime aspect which we venerate. So great a subject for spiritual contemplation, such measureless dreaming—the echo of God on the human wall!
—Victor Hugo
He who every morning plans the transactions of the day and follows out that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life. The orderly arrangement of his time is a like a ray of life which darts itself through all his occupations. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Value of Time, Planning, Time Management, Time, Goals, Focus and Priorities, Aspirations, Busy
The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Religion
Be like the bird who, halting in his flight on a limb too slight, yet sings, knowing he has wings.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Confidence
Popularity is glory’s small change.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Popularity
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