Victor Hugo

Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness more or less.

Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.

Toleration is the best religion.

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

Everything being a constant carnival there is no carnival left.

When liberty returns, I will return.

Earnestness is the salt of eloquence.

Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.

Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

No one can keep a secret better than a child.

England has two books the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare but the Bible made England.

He who opens a school door closes a prison.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that one is loved loved for oneself or better yet loved despite oneself.

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

Emotion is always new.

I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.

I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!

It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

Common sense is in spite of not as the result of education.

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.

By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.

Good night Good night Far flies the light But still Gods love Shall shine above Making all bright Good night Good night

Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.

Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.

She was a lovely blonde with fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry but her gold was on her head and her pearls were in her mouth.

One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.

A little girl without a doll is almost as unfortunate and quite as impossible as a woman without children.

Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

Popularity is glory's small change.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.

Almost all our desires when examined contain something too shameful to reveal.

The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

Dirt has been shrewdly termed misplaced material.

It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.

All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.

Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.

He does not weep who does not see.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved loved for ourselves or rather loved in spite of ourselves.

Love that is not jealous is neither true nor pure.

Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

There is no rapture in the love which is prompted by esteem; such affection is lasting, not passionate.

When a woman is talking to you listen to what she says with her eyes.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.

When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

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

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth and truth in the darkness of the mind.

To pay compliments to the one we love is the first method of caressing a demi audacity venturing. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.

Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth olf old age.

Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.

Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

A breath of Paris preserves the soul.

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

Diamonds are found only in the dark places of the earth truths are found only in the depths of thought.

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.

A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.

He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.

Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

Excitement is not enjoyment in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped not bolted at a swallow.

But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

He sought to transform the grief that looks down into the grave by showing it the grief that looks up to the stars.

To think of shadows is a serious thing.

There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.

Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast and we need a little rest from everything even the beautiful.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.

It seemed to her almost that she was pretty. This threw her in a singularly troubled state of mind. Up to that moment she had never thought of her face.