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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jean Cocteau French Poet, Artist
- Voltaire French Philosopher, Author
- Anatole France French Novelist
- Michel Houellebecq French Author
- Octave Mirbeau French Author
- Gustave Flaubert French Novelist
- Guy de Maupassant French Short-story Writer
- Remy de Gourmont French Poet, Writer
- Charles Baudelaire French Poet
- Jules Renard French Author, Diarist
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