Victor Hugo

One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.

Conscience is God present in man.

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

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.

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.

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

It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.

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.

A library implies an act of faith.

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

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

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.

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.

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

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

How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.

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

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

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

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

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.