Victor Hugo

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

Taste is the common sense of genius.

Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.

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.

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

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.

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.

A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.

Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

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

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.

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.

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