Victor Hugo

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

To love or have loved is all-sufficing. We must not ask for more. No other pearl is to be found in the shadowfolds of life. To love is an accomplishment.

Love partakes of the soul itself. it is of the same nature. like it, it is a divine spark, like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable, it is the point of fire which is within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and nothing can extinguish.

The memory of an absent person shines in the deepest recesses of the heart, shining the more brightly the more wholly its object has vanished: a light on the horizon of the despairing, darkened spirit; a star gleaming in our inward night.

People do not read stupidities with impunity.

Joie est mon caractere, C'est la faute a Voltaire; Misere est mon trousseau C'est la faute a Rousseau. [Joy is my character, 'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Misery is my trousseau 'Tis the fault of Rousseau.] - Gavroche

Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.

His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.

It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.

She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.

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.

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

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.

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

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

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 ox suffers, the cart complains.

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

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

It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.