Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885) was a French poet and novelist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best known French writers. In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements.
Outside France, his best-known works are the acclaimed novels Les Misérables, 1862, and Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831 (known in English as The Huntchback of Notre Dame). He also produced more than 4,000 drawings, which have since been admired for their beauty, and earned widespread respect as a campaigner for social causes such as the abolition of the death penalty.
Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism; his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. He was buried in the Panthéon. His legacy has been honored in many ways, including his portrait being placed on francs.
His quotes will change the way you live and think. Check them out:
1) “He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.” (Les Misérables)
2) “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.” (Les Misérables)
3) “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.” (Les Misérables)
4) “To love another person is to see the face of God.” (Les Misérables)
5) “It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.” (Les Misérables)
6) “Not being heard is no reason for silence.” (Les Misérables)
7) “Laughter is sunshine, it chases winter from the human face.” (Les Misérables)
8) “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.” (Les Misérables)
9) “Those who do not weep, do not see.” (Les Misérables)
10) “Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it."
She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--
"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.” (Les Misérables)
11) “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent” (Hugo's Works: William Shakespeare)
12) “If I speak, I am condemned.
If I stay silent, I am damned!” (Les Misérables)
13) “You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.” (Les Misérables)
14) “Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.” (The Huntchback of Notre Dame)
15) “Not being heard is no reason for silence.” (The Huntchback of Notre Dame)
16) “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.” (The Huntchback of Notre Dame)
17) “I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.
-Claude Frollo ” (The Huntchback of Notre Dame)
18) “When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.” (The Huntchback of Notre Dame)
19) “...mothers are often fondest of the child which has caused them the greatest pain.” (The Huntchback of Notre Dame)
20) “An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.” (Ninety-Three)
21) “What makes night within us may leave stars.” (Ninety-Three)
22) “Do you know what friendship is?' he asked.
'Yes,' replied the gypsy; 'it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.'
'And love?' pursued Gringoire.
'Oh! love!' said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye beamed. 'That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.” (The Huntchback of Notre Dame)
23) “A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.” (The Huntchback of Notre Dame)
24) “Morality is truth in full bloom.”
25) “It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life”
26) “Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.”
27) “Common sense is in spite of, not the result of, education.”
28) “Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.”
29) “Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.”
30) “Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”
31) “No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”
32) “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
33) “Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.”
34) “People do not lack strength, they lack will.”
35) “Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
36) “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
37) “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
38) “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.”
39) “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”
40) “To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.”
41) “No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”
42) “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”
Some of Victor Hugo's Books:
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