Victor Hugo
Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.Collection: Love
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.Collection: History
How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.Collection: Valentines
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.Collection: Men
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.Collection: Hope
Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.Collection: Fathers
He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.Collection: Morning
To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.Collection: Thanksgiving
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.Collection: Sympathy
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.Collection: Mothers
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.Collection: Poetry
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.Collection: Happiness
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.Collection: God
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.Collection: Intelligence
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.Collection: Poetry
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.Collection: Attitude
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.Collection: Beauty
Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.Collection: Beauty
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.Collection: Peace
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.Collection: Dreams
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.Collection: Education
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.Collection: Future
A war between Europeans is a civil war.Collection: War
All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Women
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.Collection: Age
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.Collection: Art
Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.Collection: Death
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.Collection: Good
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.Collection: Dreams
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.Collection: Inspirational
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.Collection: Love
Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.Collection: Happiness
Wisdom is a sacred communion.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Work
I'm religiously opposed to religion.Collection: Religion
People do not lack strength; they lack will.Collection: Strength
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.Collection: Patience
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.Collection: Time
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.Collection: Intelligence
Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.Collection: Architecture
Habit is the nursery of errors.Collection: Wisdom
Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.Collection: Intelligence
To love another person is to see the face of God.Collection: Love
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.Collection: Brainy
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.Collection: Romantic
To love beauty is to see light.Collection: Beauty
A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.Collection: Faith
To love is to act.Collection: Love
Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.Collection: Men