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
Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Risk-taking, Safety, Security, Faith
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Originality, Criticism, Enemy, Independence
Brahma once asked of Force, “Who is stronger than thou?” She replied, “Address.”
—Victor Hugo
Popularity is glory’s small change.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Popularity
There are obstinate and unknown braves who defend themselves inch by inch in the shadows against the fatal invasion of want and turpitude. There are noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees. No renown rewards, and no flourish of trumpets salutes. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, and poverty and battlefields which have their heroes.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Heroes/Heroism, Bravery, Courage
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Fashion
Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Love, Happiness
The future has many names: For the weak, it means the unattainable. For the fearful, it means the unknown. For the courageous, it means opportunity.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Names
Nothing awakens a reminiscence like an odor
—Victor Hugo
We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Religion
The nearer I approach the end, the clearer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous yet simple. For half a century I have been writing my thoughts in prose, verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode and song – I have tried all; but I feel that I have not said a thousandth part of that which is in me. When I go down to the grave I can say like many others, “I have finished my day’s work” but I cannot say, “I have finished my life’s work”; my day’s work will begin the next morning. The tomb is not a blind alley. It is an open thoroughfare. It closes in the twilight to open in the dawn. My work is only beginning; my work is hardly above its foundation. I would gladly see it mounting forever. The thirst for the infinite proves infinity.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Romance
To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost—that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization—is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Language
Progress—the onward stride of God.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Progress
There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Greatness
Upon the first goblet he read this inscription, monkey wine; upon the second, lion wine; upon the third, sheep wine; upon the fourth, swine wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, that which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which stupefies; finally the last, that which brutalizes.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Wine
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Humankind, Action
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
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Humanity
From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Animals
Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murders. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Integrity
History has its truth; and so has legend hers.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Truth
I’m religiously opposed to religion.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Religion
The delight we inspire in others, has this enchanting peculiarity. That, unlike any other reflection, returns to us more radiant than ever.
—Victor Hugo
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Service, Wealth, Charity, Kindness, Giving
Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Will Power, Willpower, One liners, Will
Not being heard is no reason for silence.
—Victor Hugo
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Hope
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Sorrow
Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Tyranny
Stupidity talks, vanity acts.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Stupidity
If suffer we must, let’s suffer on the heights.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Suffering
Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Winter
Foppery is the egotism of clothes.
—Victor Hugo
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Society, School, One liners, Education, Charity
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness. We pardon to the extent that we love. Love is knowing that even when you are alone, you will never be lonely again. & great happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. Loved for ourselves. & even loved in spite of ourselves.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Happiness, Self-love, Life, Love, Forgiveness
Men hate those to whom they have to lie.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Lies
God made only water, but man made wine.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Wine, One liners
A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Mother, Mothers
Which of our methods of measuring could we apply to this eddying mass that is the universe? In the presence of the profundities our sole ability is to dream. Our conception, quickly winded, cannot follow creation, that vast breath.
—Victor Hugo
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