Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Victor Hugo (French Novelist)

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

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Laughter, One liners

Hope is a delusion; no hand can grasp a wave or a shadow.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Hope

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Thinking, Thought, Thoughts

Men have sight; women insight.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Woman

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

A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Mother, Mothers

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Age, Time, Aging

God made only water, but man made wine.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Wine, One liners

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

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Society

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Revolution, Revolutions

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: Ideals, Ideal

Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Winter

Right is right only when entire.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Right

Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Happiness, Love

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Dreams, Planning

Progress—the onward stride of God.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Progress

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Originality, Enemy, Criticism, Independence

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: Thinking, Laziness, Thoughts, Idleness, Work

Brahma once asked of Force, “Who is stronger than thou?” She replied, “Address.”
—Victor Hugo

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Courage, Accomplishment, Bravery

Nothing awakens a reminiscence like an odor
—Victor Hugo

I’m religiously opposed to religion.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Religion

If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Guilt

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

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Common Sense, Common Sense

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Smile, Grace

The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Romance, Universe

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

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: Life, Happiness, Forgiveness, Self-love, Love

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