Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.
Victor Hugo

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Victor Hugo

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Victor Hugo

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
Victor Hugo

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

Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.
Victor Hugo

No one can keep a secret better than a child.
Victor Hugo

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
Victor Hugo

No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.
Victor Hugo

Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo

One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
Victor Hugo

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
Victor Hugo

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.
Victor Hugo

One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
Victor Hugo

One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.
Victor Hugo

One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'
Victor Hugo

Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
Victor Hugo

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
Victor Hugo

Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
Victor Hugo

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
Victor Hugo