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Victor Hugo Quotes (1802-1885)
Writer, Poet, Novelist
About Victor Hugo
Victor Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement, widely esteemed as one of the greatest of French writers and poets.
Best Victor Hugo Quotes
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Victor Hugo quotes.
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“I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.”
“Now it is all over. The French nation is dead. Conclusion, Part Second, I”
“With moral degradation goes political degradation. Conclusion, Part First, III”
“It is very fortunate that kings cannot err. Hence their contradictions never perplex us.”
“Que l'avenir soit un orient au lieu d'être un couchant, c'est la consolation de l'homme.”
“Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it.”
“La raison, c'est l'intelligence en exercice; l'imagination c'est l'intelligence en érection”
Victor Hugo Quotes by Topic
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Victor Hugo on Love 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Love →Victor Hugo on Revolution 2 quotes
“The wind of revolutions is not tractable.”
Victor Hugo on Genius 2 quotes
“Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.”
Victor Hugo on Capital punishment 2 quotes
“Three things belong to God and do not belong to men: the irrevocable, the irreparable and the indissoluble. Woe to men if they introduce it in their laws!”
Victor Hugo on Inspiration 2 quotes
“Happy he who possesses this double power of meditation and inspiration, which is genius! Whatever may be the age on which he is, or the country -- be he born in the bosom of domestic calamities, be he thrown on a time of popular convulsions, or, what is still more to be lamented, on a period of stagnant indifference --let him trust himself to the future; for, if the present belong to other men, the future is for him. He is of the number of chosen beings for whom a day is allotted. Sooner or later, the day comes ; and it is then -- fed by sublime thought, and elevated by divine inspiration -- that he throws himself boldly before the world, with the cry of the poet upon his lips ‘Voici mon Orient: peuples levez les yeux!’”
Victor Hugo on Curiosity
Victor Hugo on Birds
“I was always a lover of soft-winged things.”
What Victor Hugo Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Victor Hugo shared regarding contemporaries.
Victor Hugo on François-René de Chateaubriand
“I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.”
Victor Hugo on Voltaire
“To name Voltaire is to characterize the whole eighteenth century.”
Victor Hugo on Women
“God in his harmony has equal ends For cedar that resists and reed that bends; For good it is a woman sometimes rules, Holds in her hand the power, and manners, schools And laws, and mind; succeeding master proud. With gentle voice and smiles she leads the crowd, The somber human troop.”
Victor Hugo on Niccolò Machiavelli
“If one desires to learn at one blow, to what degree of hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the distance of centuries, let him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact. And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth..”
Victor Hugo on John Brown (abolitionist)
“Politically speaking, the murder of John Brown would be an uncorrectable sin. It would create in the Union a latent fissure that would in the long run dislocate it. Brown's agony might perhaps consolidate slavery in Virginia, but it would certainly shake the whole American democracy. You save your shame, but you kill your glory. Morally speaking, it seems a part of the human light would put itself out, that the very notion of justice and injustice would hide itself in darkness, on that day where one would see the assassination of Emancipation by Liberty itself. ... Let America know and ponder on this: there is something more frightening than Cain killing Abel, and that is Washington killing Spartacus.”
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Quotes About Victor Hugo
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Victor Hugo from others.
Vincent van Gogh on Victor Hugo
“I am reading Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. A book which I remember of old, but I had a great longing to read it again. It is very beautiful, that figure of Monseigneur Myriel or Bienvenu I think sublime....It is good to read such a book again, I think, just to keep some feelings allive. Especially love for humanity, and the faith in, and consciousness of, something higher, in short, quelque chose là-huat.”
Charles Baudelaire on Victor Hugo
Hortense Calisher on Victor Hugo
“In Hugo is maybe where I learned the freedom to be discursive, to trust that there will be readers who can accept long sentences, and long meanings. In the nineteenth century quite ordinary readers could do that.”
Jean Cocteau on Victor Hugo
Thomas Carlyle on Victor Hugo
“A glittering humbug.”
André Gide on Victor Hugo
Frances Harper "The Woman on Victor Hugo
“Victor Hugo has spoken of the nineteenth century as being woman's era, and among the most noticeable epochs in this era is the uprising of women against the twin evils of slavery and intemperance, which had foisted themselves like leeches upon the civilization of the present age.”
Helen Keller on Victor Hugo
“I admire Victor Hugo -- I appreciate his genius, his brilliancy, his romanticism; though he is not one of my literary passions. But Hugo and Goethe and Schiller and all great poets of all great nations are interpreters of eternal things, and my spirit reverently follows them into the regions where Beauty and Truth and Goodness are one.”
Anna Kuliscioff on Victor Hugo
“For the triumph of the cause of my sex, I hope only that men will be slightly less intolerant and women slightly more supportive of each other. Perhaps, at that point, the prophecy of the greatest poet of our century, Victor Hugo, will be realized: he predicted of woman what William Ewart Gladstone predicted of the factory worker-that the nineteenth century would be the "Century of the Woman."”
Lucretia Mott on Victor Hugo
“Victor Hugo in alluding to this effort on the part of woman for the redress of the wrongs and grievances under which she had suffered, says, that as the last age was notable for the effort to gain Men’s Rights, so the present generation would aim to create a revolution in public sentiment which should gain the independence of woman.”
Arthur Rimbaud on Victor Hugo
“The first romantics were seers without even really realizing it: their soul's education began by accident: abandoned trains still smoking, occasionally taking to the tracks. Lamartine was a seer now and again, but strangling on old forms. Hugo, too pigheaded, certainly saw in his most recent works: Les Misérables is really a poem. I've got Les Chatiments with me; Stella gives some sense of Hugo's vision. Too much Belmontet and Lamennais with their Jehovahs and colonnades, massive crumbling edifices.”
Muriel Rukeyser “The Education of a Poet” on Victor Hugo
“I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac.”
Jean-Paul Sartre on Victor Hugo
“Hugo, optimism incarnate, the vatic poet, recognised by God as the only worthy interlocutor, the courageous defender of the Communards...this cantor of the poor, the only one who was- and still is- read by the working classes,... this astonishing man: half priest and half anarchist, incontestable sovereign of the century.”
Disputed Quotes
Quotes attributed to Victor Hugo that are questionable.
“He who opens a school, closes a prison
• English translation: M. Duruy had already suggested that opening a school is closing a prison”
• English translation: M. Duruy had already suggested that opening a school is closing a prison”
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to Victor Hugo
About Victor Hugo
Victor Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement, widely esteemed as one of the greatest of French writers and poets.