Victor Hugo is one of the most celebrated writers of all time. His work has been translated into over 100 languages, and his quotes are some of the most inspirational and motivational ever spoken.
Here are just a few of Victor Hugo’s quotes on education, music, darkness, and death that will give you a new perspective on life:
Motivational Victor Hugo Quotes
- “Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men” -Victor Hugo
- “For prying into any human affairs, non are equal to those who concern” -Victor Hugo
- “I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary” -Victor Hugo
- “Change your opinions, keep to your principles..” -Victor Hugo
- “To put everything in balance is good; to put everything in harmony is better” -Victor Hugo
- “What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain” -Victor Hugo
- “He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends” -Victor Hugo
- “Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket” -Victor Hugo
- “The wise man does not grow old, but ripens” -Victor Hugo
- “Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education” -Victor Hugo
Education is the only thing that cannot be taken away from you.
It is the key to success in life and something that no one can ever take away from you. Victor Hugo was a French writer, poet, and dramatist considered one of the greatest authors of the nineteenth century.
He is best known for his novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In these works, he often highlighted the importance of education. For example, in Les Misérables, the character Cosette becomes a well-educated woman despite her humble beginnings.
This is because she attends a school run by the nuns at the convent where she lives. Similarly, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo, the deformed bell-ringer of Notre Dame Cathedral, can read and write despite his condition because he was taught by the gipsy girl Esmeralda.
Both of these characters demonstrate that no matter your circumstances, you can succeed if you are willing to learn and work hard.
Victor Hugo once said, “He who opens a school door closes a prison.” This quote speaks to the power of education to transform lives and break down barriers.
Education can level the playing field and give people from all walks of life an equal chance at success. It widens our perspective and helps us see the world through different eyes. As Hugo himself said.
Victor Hugo Quotes On Education
- “Her soul trembled on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower” -Victor Hugo
- “I would rather be the head of a fly than the tail of a lion” -Victor Hugo
- “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent” -Victor Hugo
- “Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots” -Victor Hugo
- “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise” -Victor Hugo
- “Taste is the common sense of genius” -Victor Hugo
- “He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two” -Victor Hugo
- “Joy’s smile is much closer to tears than laughter” -Victor Hugo
- “Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart” -Victor Hugo
- “There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of body, the soul is on its knees” -Victor Hugo
- “Don’t educate your children to be rich. Educate them to be happy, so they know the value of things, not the price” -Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo Quotes On Music
Victor Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist who was considered one of the greatest writers of the Romantic Movement.
He is best known for his novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Throughout his career, Hugo advocated for social causes such as abolishing capital punishment and using musical notation to standardize musical composition. His quotes on education, music, darkness, and death reflect his humanitarian and progressive views.
- “Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet” -Victor Hugo
- “What a gloomy thing, not to know the address of one’s soul” -Victor Hugo
- “Caution is the eldest child of wisdom” -Victor Hugo
- “Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign” -Victor Hugo
- “What a grand thing, to be loved; what a grander thing still, to love” -Victor Hugo
- “If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow” -Victor Hugo
- “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
- “The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate” -Victor Hugo
- “I find pleasure in looking at an uncultivated field; it represents possibilities” -Victor Hugo
- “Adversity makes men and prosperity makes monsters” -Victor Hugo
- “Are you afraid of the good you might do?” -Victor Hugo
- “Man lives by affirmation even more than he does by bread” -Victor Hugo
- “As for methods of prayer, all are good, as long as they are sincere” -Victor Hugo
- “I think, therefore I doubt” -Victor Hugo
- “The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring” -Victor Hugo
- “Everything bows to success, even grammar. -Victor Hugo
- “The flesh is the ashes, the soul is the flame” -Victor Hugo
- “To think of shadows is a serious thing” -Victor Hugo
- “Death belongs to God alone; by what right do men touch that unknown thing?” -Victor Hugo
- “There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust war” -Victor Hugo
- “Nothing awakens a reminiscence like an odor” -Victor Hugo
- “I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself” -Victor Hugo
- “Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection” -Victor Hugo
- “Life is a voyage” -Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo Quotes On Darkness
- “You who suffer because you love, love still more!” -Victor Hugo
- “Stupidity talks, vanity acts” -Victor Hugo
- “People do not lack strength; they lack will” -Victor Hugo
- “I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning” -Victor Hugo
- “There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers” -Victor Hugo
- “Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings” -Victor Hugo
- “There are people who observe the rules of honor as we observe the stars: from a distance” -Victor Hugo
- “I’d rather be hissed at for a good verse than applauded for a bad one” -Victor Hugo
- “The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness” -Victor Hugo
- “Those who do not weep, do not see” -Victor Hugo
- “It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live” -Victor Hugo
- “A doctor’s door should never be closed, a priest’s door should always be open” -Victor Hugo
- “To err is human. To loaf is Parisian” -Victor Hugo
- “If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned!” -Victor Hugo
- “I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is me will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!” -Victor Hugo
- “Women play with beauty, the way children play with their knives. They wound themselves with it” -Victor Hugo
- “You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love is to live by it” -Victor Hugo
- “There is nothing like a dream to create a future” -Victor Hugo
- “Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age” -Victor Hugo
- “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” -Victor Hugo
- “Conscience is God present in man” -Victor Hugo
- “Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds” -Victor Hugo
- “To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie” -Victor Hugo
- “The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man” -Victor Hugo
- “As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled” -Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo Quotes On Death
- “He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free” -Victor Hugo
- “I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build” -Victor Hugo
- “Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged by the mass, either by ridicule or slander” -Victor Hugo
- “When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable” -Victor Hugo
- “No fear, no regrets” -Victor Hugo
- “The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable” -Victor Hugo
- “If people do not love one another, I don’t see what use there would be in having spring” -Victor Hugo
- “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
- “He sought to transform the grief that looks down into the grave by showing it the grief that looks up to the stars” -Victor Hugo
- “The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to a god, this is love” -Victor Hugo
- “Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves” -Victor Hugo
- “Our lives dream the utopia, our death achieves the ideal” -Victor Hugo
- “Life is a theater set in which there are but few practicable entrances” -Victor Hugo
- “People do not read stupidities with impunity” -Victor Hugo
- “The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end, finds the light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end, finds God” -Victor Hugo
- “When we hear voices that we love, we need not understand the words they say” -Victor Hugo
- “The greatest acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness” -Victor Hugo
- “God has set his intentions in flowers, in the dawn, in spring, it is his will that we should love” -Victor Hugo
- “Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time” -Victor Hugo
- “What makes night within us may leave stars” -Victor Hugo
- “A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing” -Victor Hugo
- “Reason is intelligence taking exercise” -Victor Hugo
- “Not being heard is no reason for silence” -Victor Hugo
- “First problem. To produce wealth. Second problem. To distribute it” -Victor Hugo
- “Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence” -Victor Hugo
- “You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience” -Victor Hugo
- “Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive” -Victor Hugo
- “It is by suffering that human beings become angels” -Victor Hugo
- “For prying into any human affairs, non are equal to those whom it does not concern” -Victor Hugo
- “Virtue has a veil, vice a mask” -Victor Hugo
- “His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog” -Victor Hugo
- “No one will understand so well as a woman, how to say things that are, at once, both sweet and deep” -Victor Hugo
- “Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this” -Victor Hugo
- “Because one doesn’t like the way things are, is no reason to be unjust towards God” -Victor Hugo
- “A shadow is hard to be seized by throat and dash to the ground” -Victor Hugo
- “There is always a patch of blue sky to lovers, although the rest of the world may see nothing but their umbrellas” -Victor Hugo
- “Love is jealous and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense” -Victor Hugo
- “The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does not yet permeate it” -Victor Hugo
- “To die for lack of love is horrible. The asphyxia of the soul” -Victor Hugo
- “Progress is the stride of God” -Victor Hugo
- “A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil” -Victor Hugo
- “… where there is no more hope, song remains” -Victor Hugo
- “Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection” -Victor Hugo
- “Taste is the common sense of genius” -Victor Hugo
- “Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn” -Victor Hugo
Famous Victor Hugo Quotes
- “Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit” -Victor Hugo
- “They say love is the blindness of heart; I say not to love is blindness” -Victor Hugo
- “She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger” -Victor Hugo
- “Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them if only to avoid them” -Victor Hugo
- “Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?” -Victor Hugo
- “Love is a fault; so be it” -Victor Hugo
- “England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England” -Victor Hugo
- “’Monsieur’ to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea; ignominy thirsts for respect” -Victor Hugo
- “Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause” -Victor Hugo
- “Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite” -Victor Hugo
- “To die of love is to live by it” -Victor Hugo
- “There are things stronger than the strongest man” -Victor Hugo
- “To die is nothing, but it is terrible not to live” -Victor Hugo
- “The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate” -Victor Hugo
- “To love or to have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further there is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life” -Victor Hugo
- “Life is the flower for which love is the honey” -Victor Hugo
- “The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the faint-hearted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal” -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
- “To love another person is to see the face of God” -Victor Hugo
- ” There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come” -Victor Hugo
- “Let us sacrifice one day to gain perhaps a whole life” -Victor Hugo
- “There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher” -Victor Hugo
- “Progress must believe in the face of God. The good cannot be served by impiety. An atheist is an evil leader of the human race” -Victor Hugo
- “He who opens a school door closes a prison” -Victor Hugo
- “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent” -Victor Hugo
- “And you will keep me safe and you will keep me close and rain’ll make the flowers grow” -Victor Hugo
- “Many great actions are committed in small struggles” -Victor Hugo
- . “Ladies, a second piece of advice – do not marry; marriage is a graft; it may take hold or not. Shun the risk” -Victor Hugo
- “The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man” -Victor Hugo
- “… change your leaves, keep intact your roots” -Victor Hugo
- “For prying into any human affairs, non are equal to those whom it does not concern” -Victor Hugo
- “A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity and can command it” -Victor Hugo
- “The word which God has written on the brow of every man is Hope” -Victor Hugo
- “A mother’s arms are made of tenderness, and children sleep soundly in them” -Victor Hugo
- “Whom man kills God restores to life; whom the brothers pursue the Father redeems. Pray and believe and go onward into life” -Victor Hugo
- “Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face” -Victor Hugo
- “Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats” -Victor Hugo
- “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is slept out is a spark” -Victor Hugo
- “Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. -I shall feel it” -Victor Hugo
- “There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering – a hell of boredom” -Victor Hugo
- “Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love” -Victor Hugo
- “When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes” -Victor Hugo
- “People weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them” -Victor Hugo
- “Concision in style, precision in thought, the decision in life” -Victor Hugo
- “To know, to think, to dream. That is everything” -Victor Hugo
- “Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy” -Victor Hugo
- “Another story must begin!” -Victor Hugo
- “A study can be made against invasion by an army. No stand can be made against invasion by an idea” -Victor Hugo
- “Whom man kills God restores to life; whom the brothers pursue the Father redeems. Pray and believe and go onward into life” -Victor Hugo
- “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor” -Victor Hugo
- “Initiative is doing the right thing without being told” -Victor Hugo
- “Youth is the future smiling at a stranger, which is itself” -Victor Hugo
- “The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real” -Victor Hugo
- “Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise” -Victor Hugo
- “The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage” -Victor Hugo
- “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
- “Fashions have done more harm than revolutions” -Victor Hugo
- “Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time” -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
- “You are adorable, mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope” -Victor Hugo
- “To reform a man, you must begin with his grandmother” -Victor Hugo
- “I was dying when you came” -Victor Hugo
- “When liberty returns, I will return” -Victor Hugo
- “Portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of the paradise” -Victor Hugo
No matter what you’re facing in life, remember that you have the power to overcome it. Education can help you find freedom, music can express your innermost feelings, and even in darkness, there is hope.
When faced with death, remember that it is simply a door to another adventure. Life is full of possibilities if you just open yourself up to them. Thanks for reading!
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