Victor Hugo
The ox suffers, the cart complains.
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.
Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.
The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.
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.
What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.
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.
Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
To think of shadows is a serious thing.
It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.
To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.
A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
Love that is not jealous is neither true nor pure.
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
Taste is the common sense of genius.
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 last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.
Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.
Despotism is a long crime.
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.
Genius: the superhuman in man.
Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.
Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.
Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.
To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.
By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.
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.
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.
It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.