I would have liked to be - indeed, I should have been - a second Rembrandt.
— Victor Hugo
When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.
Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.
A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.
Love, in the eyes of the world, is either a carnal appetite or a vague fancy, which possession extinguishes or absence destroys. That is why it is commonly said, with a strange abuse of words, that passion does not endure.
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.
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
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.
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.
To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.
There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature.
My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.
Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.
A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.
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.
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.'
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.
The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.
The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
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.
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
Stupidity talks, vanity acts.
A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.
Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.
What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.
Love that is not jealous is neither true nor pure.
Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
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.
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.
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.
One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.
I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.
He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.
Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
