Victor Hugo

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

“Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.”

“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.”

“Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.”

“A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.”

“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”

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

“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”

“Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.”

“I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!”

“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.”

“Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.”

“Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.”

“Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.”

“The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.”

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

“A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.”

“A library implies an act of faith.”

“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”

“Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.”

“Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.”