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
Popularity is glory’s small change.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Popularity
Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Ideals, Light
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: Bravery, Courage, Heroes/Heroism
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
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, Focus and Priorities, Planning, Aspirations, Goals, Busy, Time Management, Time
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: One liners, Laughter
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Secrets
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: Safety, Security, Faith, Risk-taking
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Adversity
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
—Victor Hugo
One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Thought
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
History has its truth; and so has legend hers.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Truth
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Humanity
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Willpower, Will, One liners, Will Power
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
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: Greatness & Great Things, Excellence, Buddhism
In old age there is a coming into flower. My body wanes; my mind waxes.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Aging
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Deeds, Goodness, Good Deeds
To love another person is to see the face of God.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: God, Love
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
Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing?
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Death
Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Language
Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars—all the beauties of creation.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Absence
Be like the bird, who, feeling the branch break beneath him sings, knowing that he has wings.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Sin, Win
Philosophy should be an energy; it should find its aim and its effect in the amelioration of mankind.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Philosophy
Revolution is the larva of civilization.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Revolution
So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Poverty
When a woman is speaking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Listening
It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion—to rid God of His Maggots.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Duty
Friend is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Friend, Time
What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections of the soul? Man is a depth still greater than the people. Jean Valjean at that very moment was the prey of a terrible upheaval. Every sort of gulf had opened again within him. He also was trembling, like Paris, on the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution. A few hours had sufficed to bring this about. His destiny and his conscience had suddenly been covered with gloom. Of him also, as well as of Paris, it might have been said: Two principles are face to face. The white angel and the black angel are about to seize each other on the bridge of the abyss. Which of the two will hurl the other over? Who will carry the day?
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Decisions
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Excess, Waste
Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Nations, Nationality, Nation, Nationalism
If suffer we must, let’s suffer on the heights.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Suffering
Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Punishment
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
To think of shadows is a serious thing.
—Victor Hugo
Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Happiness, Love
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
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