Quotations by Author

Victor Hugo

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night — are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.

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

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

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

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

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

Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murders. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.

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.

I'm religiously opposed to religion.

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

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

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.

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

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.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

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

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

The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.

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

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

Toleration is the best religion.

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

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

It is nothing to die; it is horrible not to live.

There is in every village a torch: the schoolmaster -- and an extinguisher: the parson.

Sacrificing the earth for paradise is giving up the substance for the shadow.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.