Victor Hugo phrases: quotes and aphorisms


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Victor Hugo's phrases, the most beautiful aphorisms and quotations of this French writer who through his foresight was able to define the innermost nuances of the human soul.


Aphorisms by Victor Hugo

- True love despairs or goes into ecstasy for a lost glove or for a handkerchief found, and needs eternity for its devotion and its hopes. It is made up of the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

- Almost all the secret of great souls is contained in this word: persevering.


- I do everything I can so that my love won't disturb you, I look at you secretly, I smile at you when you don't see me. I lay my gaze and my soul everywhere, I would like to place my kisses on your hair, on your forehead, on your eyes, on your lips, wherever the caresses have free access.

- The inaccessible added to the impenetrable, the impenetrable added to the inexplicable; that's what the sky is.

- Loneliness creates people of genius or idiots.


- We know that work has always sweetened life: the fact is that not everyone likes sweets.

- The spirit, like nature, has the horror of emptiness. In emptiness, nature puts love; the spirit often hats you. Hate takes space.

- What is your kiss? A touch of flame.


- Although life is short, we make it even shorter by cheerfully wasting our time.

- Happiness is an old backdrop painted on one side only.

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- Christian hell: fire. Pagan Hell: Fire. Inferno Mohammedan: fire. Hindu hell: flames. To believe in religions, God is a rotisserie.

- The soul is full of shooting stars.

- The disdain of reasonable objections generates that sublime defeated victory which is called martyrdom.

- Love is like a tree: it emerges by itself, deeply roots in our whole being, and continues to green even over a ruined heart.

- Destiny, when it opens one door, closes another. Given certain steps forward, it is not possible to go back.

- Dying is nothing; not living is frightening.

- Courage does not fear crime and honesty does not fear authority.


- People do not lack strength, but will.

- The soul helps the body and in certain moments lifts it. It is the only bird that supports its cage.

- The naked woman is an armed woman.

- A writer is a world trapped in a person.

- Tempus edax, homo edacior, which I would gladly translate like this: time is blind, man is stupid.

- The supreme happiness of life is to be loved for what you are or, better, to be loved in spite of what you are.


- The mediocre ones let themselves be advised against by the specious obstacle; the strong no. Dying is their ally, conquering is their certainty.

- There are neither bad herbs nor bad men. There are only bad growers.

- Despair is an accountant. He wants to bring the accounts back. Nothing escapes her. Add it all up. He does not give up even the cents. Reproach God with lightning and pin strokes. He wants to know how to deal with fate. Think, weigh and calculate.

- God became man. The devil became a woman.

- Life is the flower for which love is honey.

- The paradise of the rich is made of the hell of the poor.

- Religion is nothing but the shadow cast by the universe on human intelligence.

- To love is half to believe.

- Anger can be crazy and absurd and you can be wrongly irritated; but one is indignant only when, after all, one is right in some aspect.

- In the context of moral facts, falling does not exclude hovering. From the fall rises the rise.

- The real pilot is the sailor who sails on the bottom rather than on the surface.

- God is the obvious invisible.


- Dawn has its own mysterious greatness which is made up of a dream residue and a thought principle.

- Youth is the season of ready sutures and quick scars; at that age the faces speak openly and the word is useless: there are young people whose physiognomy could be said to speak.

- To love is to be two in one: a man and a woman fused like angels in heaven.

Quotes by Victor Hugo

- There is a greater spectacle than the sea, and it is the sky, there is a greater spectacle than the sky, and it is the inside of a soul.

- A compliment is like a kiss given through a veil.

- A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep deeply.

- There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and this is an idea whose time has now come.

- Common sense exists despite, and not because of, education.

- They are the books that a man reads, the ones that accuse him most.

- The real great writers are those whose thinking occupies all the corners and folds of their style.

- Certain thoughts are prayers. There are times when, whatever the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

- Liberation is not freedom; you leave prison, but not sentencing.


- A hypocrite is a patient in the double meaning of the term. Calculate a triumph and endure a torture.

- Marriage is a graft: it takes root or not.

- Do you know who Aspasia was, sir? ... Although she lived in an age when women still did not have a soul, she was a soul; a pink and purple soul, more burning than fire, fresher than sunrise. Aspasia was a creature in which the two extremes of the woman united; she was the prostitute goddess. Socrates plus Manon Lescaut. Aspasia was created in case Prometheus needed a harlot.

- The cross is crazy; hence his glory.

- The greatest joy in life is the belief of being loved.

- When ignorance starts to dare, it has a compass in it. That compass is the intuition of the truth, sometimes clearer in a simple spirit than in a complicated spirit.

- From the shell you can understand the mollusk, from the house the tenant.

- Laziness is mother. He has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger.

- Success is very disgusting. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.

- There are people who would pay to sell themselves.

- Rice is the sun that drives winter away from the human face.

- Sometimes I have at the same time in my hands the white gloved hand that is at the top and the big black hand that is at the bottom, and I have always recognized only one man in it. After all this has passed before me I say that humanity has a synonym: equality; and that under heaven there is only one thing before which we must bow: genius; and only one before which we must kneel: goodness.


- In the destiny of every man there can be an end of the world made only for him. It's called despair.

- Freedom begins with irony.

- The pertinaci are the sublime. Those who are only daring have only an impulse; those who are only valiant have only a temperament; those who are only courageous have only one virtue; the obstinate in truth has greatness.

- Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times are epic, modern times are dramatic.

- The thread of infinity is tied to the paw of each flying bird.

- Disillusions loosen like the bow, with a left force, and shoot the man, this arrow, towards the truth.

- Perseverance is, compared to courage, what is the wheel with respect to the lever; the perpetual renewal of the foothold.

- Here is my motto: constant progress. If God wanted man to back away, he would have put an eye behind his head. We always look towards the aurora, the bud, the birth.

- Savages have vices. It is through these that civilization conquers them later.

- The Atlantic gnaws at our cliffs. The pressure of the current of the pole deforms our western coast. The wall that we have on the sea is mined; the water overwhelms swarms of stones; our ports are filled with sand and stones; the mouths of our rivers are engorged. Every day a strip of Norman land detaches and disappears into the waves.

- The mother is an angel who looks at us and teaches us to love! She warms our fingers, our head between her knees, our soul in her heart: she gives us her milk when we are little, her bread when we are grown up and her life always.

- The teachers, detestable as they are, do, not only without their knowledge, but also in spite of themselves, excellent disciples.


- There is no defined place to support the spirit.

- A microscopic point shines, then another, then another: it is the imperceptible, it is the enormous. This little light is a hearth, a star, a sun, a universe; but this universe is nothing. Each number is zero in front of infinity. The inaccessible united to the impenetrable, the impenetrable united to the unexplainable, the unexplained united to the immeasurable: this is the sky.

- Nobody knows how to keep a secret better than a child.

- Nature sometimes combines our actions with effects and shows with a kind of dark and intelligent preface, as if it wanted to make us think.

- A man is not a lazy person, if he is absorbed in his own thoughts; there is a visible and an invisible work.

Victor Hugo phrases

- Diplomats betray everything except their emotions.

- Consciousness is the chaos of chimeras, of greed and attempts, the furnace of dreams, the cave of ideas of which one is ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophisms, it is the battlefield of passions. Penetrate, in certain hours, through the bruised face of a man who is reflecting, look into that soul, in that darkness; under the external silence, there are battles of giants as in Homer, mixtures of dragons and hydro and swarms of ghosts, as in Milton, otherworldly visions as in Dante. Oh, what abyss is this infinite that every man carries within himself and with whom he desperately confronts the will of the brain and the acts of life!

- Whoever opens the door of a school closes a prison.

- A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man. He knows what he is missing.

- Moving backwards in the opposite direction of our vices leads us to opposite vices.

- A statue sculpted by Silanion and cataloged by Pliny was on the main square of Corinth: it represented Epistate. Who was Epistato? The inventor of the trip. This sums up Greece and glory.

- The sea and fate stir under the same breath.

- Anyone who says nothing copes with everything. A word that escapes you, caught in the unknown gear, can completely drag you underneath which wheels are unknown.

- Nothing compares the shyness of ignorance if not its recklessness.

- Humanity means identity: all men are made of the same clay; no difference, at least down here, in predestination; the same shadow before, the same flesh during, the same ash after. But ignorance mixed with human dough makes it incurable black, penetrating inside man becomes evil.

- Commiseration has and must have its curiosity.

- Table chatter and love talk are elusive; love talks are clouds, table chatter is smoke.

- The only social danger is ignorance.

- The spy goes hunting on behalf of others, like the dog; the envious goes hunting on his own, like the cat.

- You can resist the invasion of armies, but not that of ideas.

- Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.

- Ignorance is a reverie and curious reverie is a force.

- Being too defensive always indicates a secret desire for attack.

- The child has the gift of accepting the disappearance of a sensation very quickly. They are spared those remote and elusive contours that make up the vastness of pain.

- Do like trees: change the leaves, but keep the roots. So, change your ideas but keep your principles.

- The rich young man has a hundred brilliant and gross distractions, horse racing, hunting, tobacco, games, good lunches and everything else; occupations of the lower part of the soul to the detriment of the upper and delicate part. The poor young man finds it hard to get bread; he eats, and when he has eaten he has nothing but meditation.

- God only made water, but man made wine!

- To make the poem of human conscience, even if it were one man, of the lowest of men, would be like merging all epics into a superior and definitive epic.

- If God hadn't made the woman, he wouldn't have made the flower either.

- Envy is a good cloth for making a spy.

- Silence before justice is a kind of rebellion. Lese justice is lese majesty.

- Waterloo is a first order battle, won by a second captain.

- He who won the battle of Waterloo is not Napoleon routed, it is not Wellington, who at four o'clock falls and at five is desperate, it is not Blücher who has not fought at all; the one who won the battle of Waterloo is Cambronne. Since electrocuting the enemy who kills you with such a word means winning.

- If you want to realize what revolution is, call it Progress; but if you want to realize what progress means, call it Tomorrow; now, Tomorrow does his work irresistibly, and begins it today, always reaching his goal, in the strangest ways.

- Reprehensible actions have reserved places. Like too strong spirits, they are not drunk all at once. You put the glass down, then you will see, the first drop already makes you think.

- As long as a social condemnation exists that, in full civilization, artificially creates hells and complicates the fate that is divine with human fatality; until the three problems of the century are resolved: the degradation of man because of extreme poverty, the corruption of women because of hunger, the atrophy of the child because of darkness; as long as social asphyxia is possible in certain environments; in other words, and from an even broader point of view, as long as there is ignorance and misery on earth, books like this cannot fail to be useless.

- If it were given to our earthly eyes to see in the conscience of others, a man would be judged much more surely by what he dreams, than by what he thinks.

- The thinker wants, the dreamer suffers.

- The night - whoever writes these words has already said it elsewhere - is the proper and normal state of the creation we are part of. The day, as short in duration as in space, is only a stellar measure.

- Those who are satisfied are inexorable. For the satollo, the hungry does not exist. Happy people ignore and isolate themselves. On the threshold of their paradise, as on the threshold of their hell, one must write: "Leave all hope".

- At court, those who say trust say intrigue, and those who say intrigue say progress.

- The dreadful leveler of the lowest, shame, had passed on those fronts; when they reached that degree of lowering, everyone underwent the last transformations in the last depths; and ignorance, changed into ebetism, was identical to intelligence changed into despair. There was no choice between those men who looked to the eye like the mud elite.

- The night was thick and deaf, the water was deep. He sank. He disappeared with a dark calm. Nobody saw or heard anything. The ship continued to sail and the river to flow.

- The clash of young minds with each other has this admirable, that the spark can never be predicted nor the flash of light guessed!

- A fierce self: here is the envious.

The Wisdom of Victor Hugo - Famous Quotes (March 2024)


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