1 – I would have liked to be – indeed, I should have been – a second Rembrandt. – Victor Hugo
2 – 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 prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English. – Victor Hugo
3 – A society that admits misery, the humanity that admits war, seem to be an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and more elevated humanity at which I am aiming – a society without kings, humanity without barriers. – Victor Hugo
4 – 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. – Victor Hugo
5 – There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature. – Victor Hugo
6 – 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 future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak. – Victor Hugo
7 – Love is jealous and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense. – Victor Hugo
8 – 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. – Victor Hugo
9 – What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French. – Victor Hugo
10 – A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet. – Victor Hugo
