Victor Hugo

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

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

The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

A library implies an act of faith.

When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.

It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

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

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

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

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.

Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.

No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

I would have liked to be - indeed, I should have been - a second Rembrandt.

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'

I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.

Toleration is the best religion.

Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.

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

The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.

The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.

One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.

It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.

No one can keep a secret better than a child.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

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

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

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.

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.

Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

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

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

Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.

Those who live are those who fight.

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

Love that is not jealous is neither true nor pure.

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

The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.

I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.