Victor Hugo
Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.Collection: Time
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.Collection: Life
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.Collection: Beauty
Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.Collection: Smile
Toleration is the best religion.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Society
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.Collection: Strength
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.Collection: Change
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.Collection: Music
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.Collection: Education
Liberation is not deliverance.Collection: Freedom
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.Collection: Smile
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.Collection: Funny
Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.Collection: Great
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.Collection: Men
When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.Collection: Relationship
A library implies an act of faith.Collection: Faith
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.Collection: Age
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.Collection: Poetry
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.Collection: Truth
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.Collection: Time
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.Collection: Happiness
Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.
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.
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
Those who live are those who fight.
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
A great artist is a great man in a great child.
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
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.
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.
It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.
Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.
Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.