49 Lovely Victor Hugo Quotes To Become More Powerful

His writings showcase emotion, love, beauty and deep humanitarian beliefs. Victor Hugo will forever be among the most important cultural figures of his time and continues to be one in the modern world with the powerful impact continuously generated through his work.

Born in France in 1802, Victor Hugo was a French poet, novelist and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He began writing from a young age, and in 1817 he wrote a poem for a competition of which the Academicians refused to believe he was only 15.

Hugo was heavily influenced by François-René de Chateaubriand who was a famous figure of the literary movement of Romanticism. So much, he promised himself to be ‘Chateaubriand or nothing,’ which led to his literary success and a career which spanned over 60 years despite his exile from France. He was banished from his country in 1848 when Napoleon III came into power as he did not share the same political views.

Hugo’s 19 years away became the most productive period of his life in which he wrote some of his best work which included Les Misérables. Covering many genres, his works included lyrics, satires, spics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history, critical essays, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, letters public and private and dramas in verse and prose.

While everything he wrote was celebrated, many of his pieces inspired music during his lifetime and after his death such as the famous novels Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables. Hugo’s more famous poetry collections included Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles. He produced more than 4000 drawings in his lifetime and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment.

As he got older, Hugo became a passionate supporter of republicanism and served in politics as both deputy and senator. He became a national hero through his opposition to absolutism and colossal literary achievement and was honoured by interment in the Pantheon.

Hugo died of pneumonia in 1885 and forever remains a powerful figure in both skill and persona. As the most quoted of French littérateurs, there’s plenty of meaning in the words he’s left behind for both those who aspire to sustain or strengthen their power and those who are yet to achieve it.

1. To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.

Victor Hugo

2. There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

Victor Hugo

3. You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.

Victor Hugo

4. There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

Victor Hugo

5. He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Victor Hugo

6. Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.

Victor Hugo

7. Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. 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

8. To love another person is to see the face of God.

Victor Hugo

9. People do not lack strength, they lack will.

Victor Hugo

10. Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.

Victor Hugo

11. He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

Victor Hugo

12. An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

Victor Hugo

13. You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.

Victor Hugo

14. A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in–what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.

Victor Hugo

15. Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.

Victor Hugo

16. It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.

Victor Hugo

17. Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

Victor Hugo

18. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering–a hell of boredom.

Victor Hugo

19. The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.

Victor Hugo

20. What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.

Victor Hugo

21. I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.

Victor Hugo

22. To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Victor Hugo

23. When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.

Victor Hugo

24. What makes night within us may leave stars.

Victor Hugo

25. Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Victor Hugo

26. A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.

Victor Hugo

27. Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Victor Hugo

28. The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the fainthearted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal.

Victor Hugo

29. What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

Victor Hugo

30. The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.

Victor Hugo

31. Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.

Victor Hugo

32. To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.

Victor Hugo

33. And remember, the truth that once was spoken: To love another person is to see the face of God.

Victor Hugo

34. Laughter is sunshine, it chases winter from the human face.

Victor Hugo

35. Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.

Victor Hugo

36. Those who do not weep, do not see.

Victor Hugo

37. Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.

Victor Hugo

38. Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.

Victor Hugo

39. There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.

Victor Hugo

40. The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved — loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

Victor Hugo

41. Not being heard is no reason for silence.

Victor Hugo

42. Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.

Victor Hugo

43. 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

44. If people did not love one another, I really don’t see what use there would be in having any spring.

Victor Hugo

45. It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.

Victor Hugo

46. The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.

Victor Hugo

47. No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

48. Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.

Victor Hugo

49. Life’s great happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

Victor Hugo