Victor Hugo

And, moreover, when it happens that both are sincere and good, nothing will mix and amalgamate more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. In reality, they are the same kind of man. One has devoted himself to country upon earth, the other to his country in heaven; there is no other difference.

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

Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

With a tiny bit of effort, the nettle would be useful; if you neglect it, it becomes a pest. So then we kill it. How many men are like nettles My friends, there is no such thing as a weed and no such thing as a bad man. There are only bad cultivators.

It is often our best friends who throw us down.

Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing.

The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.

Need is a low door which, when we must by stern necessity pass through, forces the greatest to bend down the most.

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

Popularity? It's glory's small change.

Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.

Progress is the stride of God.

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.

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

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

France lost a great novel last night.

God made the water but men made the wine.

Upon the first goblet he read this inscription, monkey wine; upon the second, lion wine; upon the third, sheep wine; upon the fourth, swine wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, that which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which stupefies; finally the last, that which brutalizes.

The sewer is the conscience of the city.

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

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?