Victor Hugo

Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Dismal plain!

Les États Unis d’Europe .

Oh! que ne suis-je de pierre comme toi!

Asile!

Youth, even in its sorrows, always has a brilliancy of its own.

One of the magnanimities of woman is to yield.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act.

Too much improvisation leaves the mind stupidly void.

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.

Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.

A sewer is a cynic. It tells All.

Nothing awakens a reminiscence like an odour.

When I speak to you about myself, I am speaking to you about yourself. How is it you don’t see that?

Right is right only when entire.

The wind of revolutions is not tractable.

Thought is the labour of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.

Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

The most ferocious animals are disarmed by caresses to their young.

Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.

Monastic incarceration is castration.

The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.

For prying into any human affairs, none are equal to those whom it does not concern.

The malicious have a dark happiness.

Liberation is not deliverance.

Whom man kills, him God restoreth to life.

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

Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.

To see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball.

Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great.

Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything.

A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.

There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation.

God made only water, but man made wine.

A creditor is worse than a master; for a master owns only your person, a creditor owns your dignity and can belabour that.

It is nothing to die; it is frightful not to live.