Victor Hugo (1802–85) was a French poet, playwright, literary critic, and writer of religious and political essays. As the undisputed leader of French romanticism, Hugo wrote such celebrated novels as Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misarables.
Hugo’s father was one of Napoleon’s generals and his mother was a traditional royalist. Their 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, Victor Hugo wrote the French Romantic novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of Notre Dame.) Set in fifteenth 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 (an island in the English Channel) and wrote Les Chatiments (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 Misarables (1865.) Considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, Les Misarables 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 Misarables 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 Pantheon, where he is buried.
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It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Books, Literature, Reading
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
Friend is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Time
Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Ideas
Solitude either develops the mental powers, or renders men dull and vicious.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Solitude
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
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Planning
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
—Victor Hugo
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
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
Be like the bird, who, feeling the branch break beneath him sings, knowing that he has wings.
—Victor Hugo
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: One liners
God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Love, One liners, Men & Women
Not being heard is no reason for silence.
—Victor Hugo
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
—Victor Hugo
To reform a man, you must begin with his grandmother.
—Victor Hugo
Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
—Victor Hugo
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Praise
Man’s greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes – obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.
—Victor Hugo
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Art
I’d rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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
Nature, like a kind and smiling mother, lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.
—Victor Hugo
I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes—and the stars through his soul.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Love
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
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved—loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Happiness, Life, Love
Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Heroes/Heroism
Toleration is the best religion.
—Victor Hugo
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather loved in spite of ourselves.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Love
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Greatness, Greatness & Great Things
Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
—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: Time Management, Focus and Priorities, Planning, Goals, Aspirations, Value of Time
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Education, One liners, Society, Charity
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Style, Taste
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Potential
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
A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Mother, Mothers
Inspiration and genius–one and the same.
—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: Faith, Risk-taking
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Sorrow
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Youth, Age
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
If suffer we must, let’s suffer on the heights.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Suffering
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Time, Age, Aging
As the purpose is emptied the heart is filled.
—Victor Hugo
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Genius
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
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Words, Bitterness
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
—Victor Hugo
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
The delight we inspire in others, has this enchanting peculiarity. That, unlike any other reflection, returns to us more radiant than ever.
—Victor Hugo
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.
—Victor Hugo
A HOUSE is built of logs and stone,
of piles and post and piers;
A HOME is built of loving deeds,
That stand a thousand years.
—Victor Hugo
Adversity makes men; good fortune makes monsters.
—Victor Hugo
Topics: Adversity
You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do not bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear.
—Victor Hugo
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
—Victor Hugo
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