Victor Hugo

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

“Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.”

“Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.”

“A great artist is a great man in a great child.”

“Many great actions are committed in small struggles.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”

“Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.”

“To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.”

“Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.”

“A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.”

“Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.”

“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”

“The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl, boldness.”

“Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.”

“I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.”

“The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.”

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

“Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.”

“Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.”

“As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.”

“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.”