"Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing..." - Quote by Victor Hugo

“To live a life which is a perpetual falsehood is to suffer unknown tortures.”

“Genius is rare because the means of becoming one have not been available”

“Beauty is as useful as the useful. More so, perhaps. (Le beau est aussi utile que l'utile. Plus peut-etre.)”

“It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work when there is no definite object of any kind. To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing.”

“In a world which furnishes so many employments which are useful, and so many which are amusing, it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui [boredom] is, or if we are ever driven to the miserable resource of gaming, which corrupts our dispositions, and teaches us a habit of hostility against all mankind.”

“I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a groveling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous.”

“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.”

“Man is so great that his greatness appears even in the consciousness of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that it is misery indeed to know one's self to be miserable; but then it is greatness also. In this way, all man's miseries go to prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a mighty potentate, of a dethroned monarch.”

“Misery motivates, not utopia.”