Victor Hugo

“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.”

“When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.”

“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”

“What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.”

“Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.”

“The ideal and the beautiful are identical the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form hence idea and substance are cognate.”

“Toleration is the best religion.”

“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.”

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

“Each man should frame life so that at some future hour, fact and his dreaming meet.”

“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”

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

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

“Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.”

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

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”

“Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.”

“Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.”

“When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.”

“Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.”

“Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.”