A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement — in a word, with more renunciation than you care for — and so you flee the contagion. – Victor Hugo
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet. – 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
Your mock saint who stands in a niche is not a woman if she have not suffered, still less a woman if she have not sinned. Fall at the feet of your idol as you wish, but drag her down to your level after that — the only level she should ever reach, that of your heart. – Baroness Emmuska Orczy