"Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters."

Hugo, Victor on Adversity
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"When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age."

Hugo, Victor on Age and Aging
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"Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age."

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"A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it."

Hugo, Victor on Debt
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"We are the children of our own deeds."

Hugo, Victor on Deeds and Good Deeds
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"There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime."

Hugo, Victor on Desperation
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"Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant."

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"It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion --to rid God of His Maggots."

Hugo, Victor on Duty
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"He who opens a school door, closes a prison."

Hugo, Victor on Education
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"There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation."

Hugo, Victor on Eloquence
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"In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge."

Hugo, Victor on Enlightenment
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"It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive. Why should it exaggerate? There is that which should be destroyed and that which should be simply illuminated and studied. How great is the force of benevolent and searching examination! We must not resort to the flame where only light is required."

Hugo, Victor on Exaggeration
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"There are fathers who do not love their children, but there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson."

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"God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool."

Hugo, Victor on Flirting
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"Liberation is not deliverance."

Hugo, Victor on Freedom
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"Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite."

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

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"There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling."

Hugo, Victor on Greatness
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"Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved."

Hugo, Victor on Happiness
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"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. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other."

Hugo, Victor on History and Historians
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"Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit."

Hugo, Victor on Human Rights
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"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."

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"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come."

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"Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come."

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

Hugo, Victor on Idleness
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"Whenever we encounter the Infinite in man, however imperfectly understood, we treat it with respect. Whether in the synagogue, the mosque, the pagoda, or the wigwam, there is a hideous aspect which we execrate and a sublime aspect which we venerate. So great a subject for spiritual contemplation, such measureless dreaming -- the echo of God on the human wall!"

Hugo, Victor on Infinity
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"Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization."

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"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."

Hugo, Victor on Language
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"Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face."

Hugo, Victor on Laughter
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"A library implies an act of faith."

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"Those who live are those who fight."

Hugo, Victor on Life and Living
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"Life is a voyage."

Hugo, Victor on Life and Living
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"Life is a flower of which love is the honey."

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"Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings."

Hugo, Victor on Animals
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"From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought."

Hugo, Victor on Animals
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"Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause."

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"When a woman is speaking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes."

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

Hugo, Victor on Love
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"I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes -- and the stars through his soul."

Hugo, Victor on Love
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"Life is the flower for which love is the honey."

Hugo, Victor on Love
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