Victor Hugo

“To love beauty is to see light.”

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

“Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.”

“Liberation is not deliverance.”

“Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.”

“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.”

“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”

“When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.”

“One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”

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

“Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.”

“When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.”

“Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.”

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.”

“Conscience is God present in man.”

“Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.”

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

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

“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”

“Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.”

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”