Victor Hugo

“ For all this grandeur! Thou abandoned art
By every party; by the people spurned;
Thy family is with thy star at war,
And, forcing thee to make its will thy law,
Doth pull thee to and fro, and here and there,
By thy king's cloak! And even thine own son!
O God! I am abhorred by every one,
And everything combines to overwhelm me.
I've enemies, aflame with bitter hate,
Throughout the world—and elsewhere, too, I doubt—
E'en in the tomb!—But better days will come,
It may be.—Better days! what do I say?
For fifteen years past, my destiny
Hath gone its way as by a miracle. ”

“ Like God, the true poet is present in every part of his work at once. Genius resembles the die which stamps the king's effigy on copper and golden coins alike.
We do not hesitate—and this will demonstrate once more to honest men how far we are from seeking to discredit the art—we do not hesitate to consider verse as one of the means best adapted to protect the drama from the scourge we have just mentioned, as one of the most powerful dams against the irruption of the commonplace, which, like democracy, is always flowing between full banks in men's minds. ”

“ Let the poet beware especially of copying anything whatsoever—Shakespeare no more than Molière, Schiller no more than Corneille. If genuine talent could abdicate its own nature in this matter, and thus lay aside its original personality, to transform itself into another, it would lose everything by playing this rôle of its own double. It is as if a god should turn valet. We must draw our inspiration from the original sources. It is the same sap, distributed through the soil, that produces all the trees of the forest, so different in bearing power, in fruit, in foliage. ”