Victor Hugo, one of France’s greatest literary figures, gave the world masterpieces like Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, blending poetic language with a fierce commitment to justice and human dignity. As a writer, politician, and activist, he used his voice to challenge oppression and inspire reform. Hugo's legacy endures through his passion for truth, compassion, and the belief that literature can ignite change and uplift the soul of society.
"That I may carry on what I have begun, that I may do good, that I may be one day a grand and encouraging example that it may be said that there was finally some little happiness resulting from this suffering which I have undergone and this virtue to which I have returned!"
"What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant..."
"So you're giving up? That's it? Okay, okay. We'll leave you alone, Quasimodo. We just thought, maybe you're made up of something much stronger."
"To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do."
"This is the shade of difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of the priest should always be open."
"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."
"Do not inquire he name if him who asks a shelter of you. The very man who's embarrassed by his name is the one who needs shelter."
"There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit."
"People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back.They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake."
"The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved."
"This cavern is below all, and the enemy of all; it is hatred, without exception."
"She let her head fall back upon Marius' knees and her eyelids closed. He thought that poor soul had gone. Eponine lay motionless; but just when Marius supposed her for ever asleep, she slowly opened her eyes in which the gloomy deepness of death appeared, and said to him with an accent the sweetness on which already seemed to come from another world:"And then, do you know, Monsieur Marius, I believe I was a little in love with you."She essayed to smile again and expired."
"Un sceptique qui adhA re A un croyant cela est simple comme la loi des couleurs complA©mentaires.Ce qui nous manque nous attire."
"Revolution is the accession of the peoples, and, at the bottom, the People is Man."
"There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson."
"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."
"Listen, Monsieur Director, here's what I think. Obviously this is wrong. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms; there are three of us in space enough for sixty. That is wrong, I assure you. You have my house and I am in yours. Give me back mine and this will be your home."
"In love there are no friends everywhere where there is a pretty woman hostility is open."
"Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced."
"A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour, light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon."
"One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'"
"It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes."