Victor Hugo

Who then can calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?

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

Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections... science is a ladder... poetry is a winged flight... An artistic masterpiece exists for all time... Dante does not efface Homer.

One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant.

It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.

Because a fact seems strange to you, you conclude that it is not one. ... All science, however, commences by being strange. Science is successive. It goes from one wonder to another. It mounts by a ladder. The science of to-day would seem extravagant to the science of a former time. Ptolemy would believe Newton mad.

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

The clouds, - the only birds that never sleep.

A republic may be called the climate of civilization.

I dislike wealth and prosperity, especially that of other men.

Nothing awakens reminiscence like an aroma.

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

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.

Love is the salutation of the angel to the stars

For prying into any human affairs, non are equal to those whom it does not concern.

No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.

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

Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.

It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.

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