Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor Marie Hugo (February 26, 1802 - May 22, 1885) is recognized as the most influential French Romantic writer of the 19th century and is often identified as the greatest French poet.

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These two halves of God, the Pope and the emperor.
- Harnani, Act IV, sc. ii (1830)

God became a man, granted. The devil became a woman.
- Ruy Blas, Act II, sc. v (1838)

You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do no bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear.
- Villemain (1845)

On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées.
- Literal Translation: One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.
- Histoire d'un Crime (History of a Crime) (written 1852, published 1877)
- Alternative translations and variants:
  - One cannot resist an idea whose time has come.
  - No one can resist an idea whose time has come.
  - Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.
  - Armies cannot stop an idea whose time has come.
  - No army can stop an idea whose time has come.
  - There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Morne plaine!
Translation: Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Dismal plain!
- Les Châtiments, L'Expiation (1853)

Vous créez un frisson nouveau.
Translation: You have created a new thrill.
- Letter to Baudelaire (October 6, 1859)

Le compliment, c'est quelque chose comme le baiser à travers le voile.
- Translated as: "A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil."
- Les Misérables (1862)

Les bleuts sont bleus. Les roses sont roses.
- Translated as: "Violets are blue. Roses are red."
- Les Miserables (1862)

To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.
- Quatrevingt-treize (Ninety-Three) (1874)

The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.
- Love in Prison

To rise at six, to dine at ten,
To sup at six, to sleep at ten,
Makes a man live for ten times ten.
- Inscription over the door of Hugo's study

I represent a party which does not yet exist: the party of revolution, civilization.
This party will make the twentieth century.
There will issue from it first the United States of Europe, then the United States of the World.
- On the wall of the room inwhich Hugo died, Place des Vosges, Paris

"Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds."
- Les Misérables

Publisher of the Italian translation of Les Misérables (18 October 1862)

You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Misérables is written for all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: "Open to me, I come for you."

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.

I resume. This book, Les Misérables, is no less your mirror than ours. Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book, — I understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use. As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: "Help me!"

Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.

Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art — the finest of all, perhaps — truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.

It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to remain silent.

In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.

Que dit la loi? Tu ne tueras pas! Comment le dit-elle? En tuant!
- Translation: What does the law say? You will not kill! How does it say it? By killing!

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.
- Though research done for Wikiquote indicates that the attribution of this remark to Hugo seems extensive on the internet, no source has been identified. It seems to be a statement a modern satirist might make, derived from one made circa 1910 by Mrs Patrick Campbell regarding homosexuals: "Does it really matter what these affectionate people do— so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses?"