1,711 Quotes by Victor Hugo

You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.

It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good.

The sole social evil is darkness; humanity is identity, for all men are made of the same clay.

Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Facts are one, ideas are the other.

... plunged into chance,--that is to say, swallowed up in Providence

The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment’s silence, "Perhaps more so.

The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.