Victor Hugo

“As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.”

“Stupidity talks, vanity acts.”

“Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.”

“Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.”

“Those who are ignorant should be taught all you can teach them; society is to blame for not providing free public education; and society will answer for the obscurity it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sin will be committed. The guilty party is not he who has sinned but he who created the darkness in the first place.”

“He had the confidence of a man who had never been wounded.”

“It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.”

“Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.”

“I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.”

“Let us never weary of repeating, that to think first of the disinherited and sorrowful classes; to relieve, ventilate, enlighten, and love them; to enlarge their horizon to a magnificent extent; to lavish upon them education in every shape; to set them an example of labor, and never of indolence; to lessen the weight of the individual burden by increasing the notion of the universal aim; to limit poverty without limiting wealth; to create vast fields of public and popular activity; to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the crushed and the weak; to employ the collective power in the grand task of opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude, and laboratories for every intellect; to increase wages, diminish toil, and balance the debit and credit--that is to say, proportion enjoyment to effort, and supply to demand; in a word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort, is (and sympathetic souls must not forget it) the first of brotherly obligations, and (let egotistic hearts learn the fact) the first of political necessities.”

“To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.”

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”

“Certainly, I approve of political opinions, but there are people who do not know where to stop.”

“A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.”

“אני בא אליך האדון; אני בא אליך כי אתה טוב רחום וחנון.”

“אילו לחרוזיי היו כנפיים, כנפיים כמו לציפורים, הם היו נמלטים שבריריים ונעימים אל גנינו היפים.”

“לאלוהים לא היו אלא מים, אך האדם עשה את היין.”

“האדם כמוהו כבית כלא שבתוכו הנפש נשארת חופשית.”

“השנאה היא חורף של הלב.”

“תנו, עשירים! צדקה היא אחותה של התפילה.”