Victor Hugo Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Victor Hugo with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
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“The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one’s own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of one’s self;”
Meaning & context
Hugo’s narrator presents the felt certainty of being loved—including despite one’s imperfections—as an especially deep form of happiness.
Source details
Les Misérables, Project Gutenberg #135, in the represented Isabel F. Hapgood public-domain English translation. The sentence occurs in the narrator’s reflection on love and blindness; its English phrasing is translation-specific and belongs to the novel’s moral-religious rhetoric.
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“Nothing renders one so adventurous as not being able to feel the place where one’s pocket is situated.”
Meaning & context
Hugo’s narrator jokes that having nothing left to lose can make Gringoire unexpectedly bold as he ventures farther into danger.
Source details
Notre-Dame de Paris, represented by Project Gutenberg #2610 in an English translation. The narrator makes the comic remark while the penniless Gringoire moves through Paris; the English wording is translation-layer text, not Hugo’s original French phrasing.
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“Religion, Society, and Nature! these are the three struggles of man.”
Meaning & context
Hugo frames human life as involving simultaneous struggles with belief, social institutions and the physical world.
Source details
Toilers of the Sea, Preface, represented by Project Gutenberg #32338 in W. Moy Thomas's English translation. 'Religion, Society, and Nature! these are the three struggles of man' opens Hugo's triadic framing of Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Misérables and Toilers of the Sea. It is translated authorial/literary framing, not a social-scientific taxonomy of every human struggle.