Victor Hugo

A faith is a necessity to man. Woe to him who believes nothing.

He caught glimpses of everything, but saw nothing.

Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.

This lowly sand which you trample beneath your feet, if you cast it into the furnace, and let it melt and seethe, shall become resplendent crystal, and by means of such as it a Galileo and a Newton shall discover stars.

The mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling nor more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. 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.

To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man, were it only of the most infamous of men, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and final epic. The conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts and of temptations, the furnace of dreams, the cave of the ideas which are our shame; it is the pandemonium of sophisms, the battlefield of the passions. At certain hours, penetrate within the livid face of a human being who reflects, and look at what lies behind; look into that soul, look into that obscurity. There, beneath the external silence, there are combats of giants as in Homer, melees of dragons and hydras, and clouds of phantoms as in Milton, ghostly labyrinths as in Dante. What a gloom enwraps that infinite which each man bears within himself, and by which he measures in despair the desires of his will, and the actions of his life!

To be wicked does not insure prosperity — for the inn did not succeed well.

A good mayor is a good thing. Are you afraid of the good you can do?

Both had wings, one like angel, the other like a goose.

There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.

To think of the Gloom is a serious thing.

Truly at that instant, if Jean Valjean had had a kingdom, he would have given it for a rope.

We do not comprehend everything, but we insult nothing.