Born: February 26, 1802 | Died: May 22, 1885
Nationality: French | Genre: Classic Fiction, Romanticism, Poetry, Social Commentary
Victor Hugo was a French writer whose work is grand in feeling and scale. He wrote the novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which mix love, struggle, and hope with strong views on justice and the poor. He was also a major poet and a successful playwright, using bold images and big emotions to move readers and audiences. His stories are full of unforgettable figures, kind souls, fierce rebels, and outsiders who fight to be seen as human.
Hugo lived through political change and often spoke out for freedom and human rights. At times he was praised; at other times he was exiled for his views, spending years on the Channel Islands before returning to France. He wrote with great energy all his life, filling pages with passion, detail, and a deep belief that people can grow better. Today his books still speak to readers around the world because they show both the pain and the power of the human heart.
The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow.”
fromLes MisérablesbyThe reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, that is love.
fromLes MisérablesbyPoverty in youth, when it succeeds, has this magnificent property about it, that it turns the whole will towards effort, and the whole soul towards aspiration.
fromLes MisérablesbyHe never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.
fromLes MisérablesbyThere exist crab-like souls, which creep continually towards darkness, retrograding in life rather than advancing in it, employing experience to diminish themselves, growing continually worse, becoming more and more enveloped in increasing malignity, and retreating, not into old age, but into corruption.
fromLes MisérablesbyIf you emerge from that sad place with thoughts of hatred and of wrath against mankind, you are deserving of pity; if you emerge with thoughts of good-will and of peace, you are more worthy than any one of us.
fromLes MisérablesbyThe sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else.
fromLes MisérablesbyLife, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the fields of battle which have their heroes; obscure heroes, who are, sometimes, grander than the heroes who win renown.
fromLes MisérablesbyIf you wish to gain an idea of what revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of the nature of progress, call it To-morrow.
fromLes MisérablesbyIf I had learned to read I should not perhaps have stolen the bread. You see, I could not learn to read. When I was at the galleys, I learned. There was a school for convicts.
fromLes Misérablesby