518 Inspiring Quotes by Victor Hugo

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.

The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.

He does not weep who does not see.

Make thought a whirlwind.

Astronomy, that micography of heaven, is the most magnificent of the sciences. ... Astronomy has its clear side and its luminous side; on its clear side it is tinctured with algebra, on its luminous side with poetry.

What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.

The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.

All men are made of the same clay.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

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

The miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.

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

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

A clock does not stop at the very moment you lose the key.

The delight we inspire in others has this enchanting peculiarity that, far from being diminished like every other reflection, it returns to us more radiant than ever.

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

A fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.

It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory.

He who opens a school door closes a prison.

The world of sleep has an existence of its own.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

At the shrine of friendship never say die, let the wine of friendship never run dry.

Night and the day, when united, Bring forth the beautiful light.

The poor priest went to his poor mountaineers with empty hands, and he returns from them with his hands full. I set out bearing only my faith in God; I have brought back the treasure of a cathedral.

For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud -- and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule -- that everything that exists in nature exists in art.

The earth is a great piece of stupidity.

A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.

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.

As for methods of prayer, all are good, as long as they are sincere.

You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman.

A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.

Love is reducing the universe to one being.

Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.

What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.

The flesh is the surface of the unknown.

Sleep comes more easily than it returns.

A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.

Does not beauty confer a benefit upon us, even by the simple fact of being beautiful?

When liberty returns, I will return.

Love is the salutation of the angel to the stars.

He sought to transform the grief that looks down into the grave by showing it the grief that looks up to the stars.

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.

To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.

Not being heard is no reason for silence.

Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

Progress is the stride of God.

I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.

There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.

There is only one thing stronger than all the armies of the world: and that is an idea whose time has come.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.

There is no rapture in the love which is prompted by esteem; such affection is lasting, not passionate.

God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.

It is from books that wise men derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.

During the years of suffering he reachd the conclusion that life was war in which he was one of the defeated. Hatred was his onlt weapon, and he resolved to sharpen it in prison and carry it with him when he left.

To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time.

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

Ces ténèbres, Dea les y avait en elle et Gwynplaine les avait sur lui.

Because things are not agreeable," said Jean Valjean, "that is no reason for being unjust towards God.

He had not yet lived long enough to have discovered that nothing is more close at hand then the impossible, and that what must be looked for is always the unforeseen.

To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul.

One does not cross-examine a saint.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

In the domain of art there is no light without heat.

He would give all of his clothes to his servant, admonishing him NOT to return them until he had completed his day's work.

The most terrible of motives and the most unanswerable of responses: Because.

Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.

Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

One drop of wine is enough to redden a whole glass of water.

Those who do not weep, do not see.

Nothing is more true, more real, than the primeval magnetic disturbances that two souls may communicate to one another, through the tiny sparks of a moment's glance.

There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art.

When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.

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

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

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

Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.

If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

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

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.

Toleration is the best religion.

I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.

Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.

A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.

To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.

Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.

He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.

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

A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.

And do you know Monsieur Marius? I believe I was a little in love with you.

If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned!

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.

True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.

I have a dream my life would be. So different from this hell I'm living. So different now from what it seem. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

A queen, devoid of beauty is not queen;
She needs the royalty of beauty's mien.

The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.

He did not study God; he was dazzled by him.

Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.

God made only water, but man made wine.

One only needs to see a smile in a white crape bonnet in order to enter the palace of dreams.

Loving is almost a substitute for thinking. Love is a burning forgetfulness of all other things. How shall we ask passion to be logical?

The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.

Revolution is the larva of civilization.

Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.

Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.

A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.

History has its truth; and so has legend hers.

Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.

The boughs, without becoming detached from the trunk grow away from it.

Despotism is a long crime.

Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with the other.

A bird alone could have extricated himself from that place.

The most excellent symbol of the people is the paving stone. One walks on it until it falls on one's head.

The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests upon anything but what is elevated and great.

Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.

To be wicked does not insure prosperity -- for the inn did not succeed well.

Gutenberg's invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution.

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.

If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.

There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think.

From Lordship to Eminence is but a step, and between Eminence and Holiness there is only the wisp of smoke from a burnt voting-slip.

Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.

Cheerfulness is like money well expended in charity; the more we dispense of it, the greater our possession.

But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.

Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.

Everything speaks: the flowing airstream and the sailing halycon, the blade of grass, the flower, the bud, the element; did you imagine the universe to be otherwise?

I like the laughter that opens the lips and the heart, shows at the same time the pearls and the soul.

All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.

Genius is rare because the means of becoming one have not been available.

I don't remember which philosopher it was who said: There is never any shortage of old women.

No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision?

O darkness, the sky is a gloomy precinct Whose door you close, and whose key the soul owns; And night divides itself in half, being diabolical and holy, Between Ilis, the black angel, and Christ, the starry Human Being.

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.

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

The future has many names: For the weak, it means the unattainable. For the fearful, it means the unknown. For the courageous, it means opportunity.

Never, even among animals, does the creature born to be a dove change into an osprey. That is only seen among men.

For sight is woman-like and shuns the old.

It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblences to merit.

What is admirable in the clash of young minds is that no one can foresee the spark that sets off an explosion or predict what kind of explosion it will be.

The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.

Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it -- there is a certain shameful solidarity.

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

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

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Facts are one, ideas are the other.

Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything.

A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.

Symmetry is tedious, and tedium is the very basis of mourning. Despair yawns.

What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.

The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.

You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.

Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.

It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.

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

Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how much better everything would go!

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.

When grace combines with wrinkles, it is admirable. There is an indescribable light of dawn about intensely happy old age... The young person is handsome, but the old, superb.

He is the best gentleman that is the son of his own deserts, and not the degenerated heir of another's virtue.

The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.

Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.

Paris, viewed from the towers of Notre Dame in the cool dawn of a summer morning, is a delectable and a magnificent sight; and the Paris of that period must have been eminently so.

But listen, there will be more joy in heaven over the tears of a repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred just men.

Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.

Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.

I encountered in the street a penniless young man who was in love. His hat was old and his jacket worn, with holes at the elbows; water soaked through his shoes, but starlight flooded through his soul.

My day's work will begin again the next morning. The tomb is not a blind alley.

A library implies an act of faith.

You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea.

The country wails, that may be, but humanity applauds. But is it true that the country does wail? France bleeds, but liberty smiles; and in the presence of liberty's smile, France forgets her wound.

The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.

For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.

He was not his father, and this was not his work; but he was the master, and this was his masterpiece.

A person may not want any more of his cake; but that is no reason for giving it away.

At the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of Heaven fills those who are quitting the light of Earth.

Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.

A sewer is a cynic. It tells All.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

Take all reasonable advantage of that which the present may offer you. It is the only time which is ours. Yesterday is buried forever, and to-morrow we may never see.

So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened.

Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.

Protect the workers, encourage the rich.

There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.

Without seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, he gazed upon it. He did not study God; he was dazzled by Him.

Geniuses are disconcerting. Their comings and goings in the ideal world give one vertigo ... They have a telescope in one eye and a microscope in the other.

These are true felicities. No joy beyond these joys. Love is the only ecstasy, everything else weeps.

One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'

The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

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

Hypocrisy is nothing, in fact, but a horrible hopefulness.

Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.

Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind.

Algebra applies to the clouds.

Dirt has been shrewdly termed "misplaced material."

Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it constantly blaze with noble lessons of courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history and form one of man's guiding lights.

Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood.

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering -- a hell of boredom.

The clouds, -- the only birds that never sleep.

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.

I believe that pity is a law like justice, and that kindness is a duty like uprightness.

Joy is the reflex of terror.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.

It is by suffering that human beings become angels.

Civil war.... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as "foreign war"? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers?

Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

It is God who makes woman beautiful, it is the devil who makes her pretty.

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.

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.

I shall be great and you rich, because we love each other.

The man who fights against his own country is never a hero.

All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word 'no.' To 'no' there is only one answer and that is 'yes.'

Cities make ferocious men because they make corrupt men. The mountains, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.

Earnestness is the salt of eloquence.

The owl goes not into the nest of the lark.

Above all, you can believe in Providence in either of two ways, either as thirst believes in the orange, or as the ass believes in the whip.

Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.

Woman, nude, is the blue sky. Clouds and garments are an obstacle to contemplation. Beauty and infinity would be gazed upon unveiled.

Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men.

A doctor's door should never be closed, a priest's door should always be open.

One of the magnanimities of woman is to yield.

The truth of an upright man must be accepted on his own terms. Moreover, since natures vary, we must agree that all the beauties of human excellence may be fostered by faiths that we do not share.

For dogs we kings should have lions, and for cats, tigers. The great benefits a crown.

Thought is the work of the intellect, reverie is its self-indulgence. To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse a poison with a source of nourishment.

I was confided to your loyalty and accepted by your treason; you offer my death to those to whom you had promised my life. Do you know who it is you are destroying here? It is yourself.

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

What a gloomy thing, not to know the address of one's soul.

Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth.

Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.

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

Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.

Vulgarity is an old Narcissus who adores himself and applauds the common vulgarity.

The sewer is the conscience of the city.

One of the hardest labours of the just man is to expunge from his soul a malevolence which it is difficult to efface.

Love is a fault; be it so. Fantine was innocence floating upon the surface of this fault.

When a person opens a book, he can never be in prison.

The devotion of one man had given strength and courage to all.

Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right.

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.

Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.

He sleeps, though fate for him was truly odd.
He lived. He died when his angel was gone.
The thing just happened of its own accord
As night comes on when day is gone.

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

He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.

No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.

To learn to read is to light a fire.

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

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

The left-handed are precious; they take places which are inconvenient for the rest.

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

We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult where everything speaks except our mouths. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.

There is a way of avoiding a person which resembles a search.

What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?

There is a secret drawer in every woman's heart.

I refuse the oration of all churches. I ask a prayer of all souls. I believe in God.

A mother who loses her child can no longer believe in God.

Do you know what friendship is… it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.

To reform a man, you must begin with his grandmother.

To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.

Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.

A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children." from chapter VIII of Les Miserables.

Thus, during those nineteen years of torture and slavery, did this soul rise and fall at the same time. Light entered on the one side, and darkness on the other.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions.

Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?

Press on! A better fate awaits thee.

Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.

People overwhelmed with trouble do not look behind; they know only too well that misfortune follows them.

I had a dream my life would be different from this hell I am living, so different from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.

Don't educate your children to be rich. Educate them to be happy, so they know the value of things, not the price.

It seemed to her almost that she was pretty. This threw her in a singularly troubled state of mind. Up to that moment she had never thought of her face.

The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.

If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes of the old, you see light.

Nature, like a kind and smiling mother, lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.

England has two books; the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England.

When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.

He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.
Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.
Nothing is more sublime.

Teach the ignorant as much as you can.

Inanimate objects sometimes appear endowed with a strange power of sight. A statue notices, a tower watches, the face of an edifice contemplates.

If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.

France is great because she is France.

Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.

He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality.

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

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.

Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.

As he spoke all tongues, he entered into all hearts.

The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribute, that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What will spring up in a moment? Nobody knows.

What have we to fear, we who believe?

A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?

To contemplate is to look at shadows.

Excitement is not enjoyment: in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped, not bolted at a swallow.

Taste is the common sense of genius.

Conscience is God present in man.

We are given up to those gods, those monsters, those giants, -- our thoughts.

Life is a flower of which love is honey.

What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant.

Liberation is not deliverance.

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.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.

People do not read stupidities with impunity.

On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.

In a little town, there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.

The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.

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.

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

Nobody loves the light like the blind man.

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

Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

What makes night within us may leave stars.

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

Inspiration and genius one and the same.

We do not comprehend everything, but we insult nothing.

Good night! Good night! Far flies the light; But still God's love Shall shine above, Making all bright, Good night! Good night!

Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.

One believes others will do what he will do to himself.

Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!

A smile is the same as sunshine; it banishes winter from the human countenance.

Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.

Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.

No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.

Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping.

In love there are no friends everywhere where there is a pretty woman hostility is open.

Those who live are those who fight.

Love that is not jealous is neither true nor pure.

There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

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

Here we stop. Upon the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, his finger on his lip.

He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.

Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.

All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.

Take away time is money, and what is left of England? take away cotton is king, and what is left of America?

Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.

If no one loved, the sun would go out.

During a wise man's whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy in a state of siege.

A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in -- what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.

A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been.

Reaction a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.

A joyous little creature, so beautiful, It was as if a gate of Heaven opened as she came in.

A republic may be called the climate of civilization.

In every cradle decked with rosy wreath Lurk germs of death.

I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.

The poetic element lying hidden in most women is the source of their magnetic attraction.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

There is always a patch of blue sky to lovers, although the rest of the world may see nothing but their umbrellas.

Hasret; özlenenden uzak mı kalmaktır?
özlenen yakındayken hicran duyulamaz mı?

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

War can only be qualified by its object, and there is neither foreign war nor civil war, there is only just or unjust war.

One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.

Popularity -- a piece of faded tinsel, that is out of date.

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.

The terrible shock of his sentence had in some way broken that wall which separates us from the mystery of things beyond and which we call life.

Popularity? It's glory's small change.

Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.

Word which the finger of God has written on the brow of every man -- hope!

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?

The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.

We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.

You are adorable, mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope.

I didn't believe it could be so monstrous. It's wrong to be so absorbed in divine law as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men tough that unknown thing?

Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.

There is a point at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, a fatal word, Les Miserables.

He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.

All animals are to be found in men and each of theme exists in some man, sometimes several at the time.

God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door.

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.

To pay compliments to the one we love is the first method of caressing, a demi-audacity venturing. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.

Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment.

By making himself a priest he made himself a demon.

True thinkers are characterized by a blending of clearness and mystery.

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

There is in every village a torch -- the teacher; and an extinguisher -- the priest.

If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.

Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

And when one says student, one says Parisian: to study in Paris is to be born in Paris.

Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter.

I will weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep with me over the children of the people.

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

The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. This hatred would involve the hatred of the arts.

Years place at last a venerable crown upon a head.

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.

Philosophy is the microscope of thought.

When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.

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

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.

Everything bows to success, even grammar.

The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.