Victor Hugo

To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

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.

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.

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

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

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

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.

People do not lack strength they lack will.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

I'm religiously opposed to religion.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.