Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book. – Victor Hugo
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees. – Victor Hugo
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide. – Victor Hugo
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. – Victor Hugo
It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her. – Victor Hugo
The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced. – Victor Hugo
He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life. – Victor Hugo
Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God. – Victor Hugo
The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable. – Victor Hugo
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate. – Victor Hugo
Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides. – Victor Hugo
The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness. – Victor Hugo
Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense. – Victor Hugo
Thought is more than a right – it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought. – Victor Hugo
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. – Victor Hugo
Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night. – Victor Hugo