Victor Hugo - Quotes

Victor Hugo was born as a son of a General; because his father was permanently away he was bred chiefly by his mother. At the age of 13 he already wrote first poems and at the age of 17 he founded a critical literary magazine for which he contributed the most articles. Victor Hugo lost an important parent person when his mother died in 1821.

Victor Hugo got married at the age of 20 and published his first poem volume one year later. With the fantastic novel "Han d'Islande" the public became aware of Hugo for the first time. He was involved in the literary group "Cénacle" und became their speaker.

Though Victor Hugo grew up in royal surroundings, his next poem "Les Orientales" revealed a byroneske sympathy for the Greek patriots and for the republic.

In 1827 he performed "Marion de Lorme", but the play fall victim to the censorship. Hugo reacted to this failure with "Hernani" - came out in 1830; in which verses he praised a young outlaw - and produced with it a romantic movement and Hugo became a symbol for the romantic young generation.

Just only 29 years old Victor Hugo wrote his most popular novel "Notre Dame de Paris - The Hunckback of Notre Dame", which once more moved a social outsider into the hub of the happening. Victor Hugo achieved with this novel to success and glory.

His later life was influenced by difficult political circumstances and family bad blows (his married daughter drowned in 1843).

When the revolution broke out in 1848, Victor Hugo couldn't decide on for one of both sides. He was a friend of Louis-Philippe and as a representative of Paris he supported Louis-Napoléon. But with the coup of 1851 he showed his true color and expressed his displeasure with protests. Victor Hugo had to flee. He fled to Brussels first and then went on to Jersey.

Victor Hugo stood nearly twenty years in exile, but there - and later in Guernsey - he produced some of his best works, for example the marvelous poem "Les Châtimes", his colorful "Légende des Siècles" and the novel "Les Misérables", in which he narrates of Paris of his youth. With the last-mentioned he erected a monument to himself in the world of lit

erature.

In a famous "Préface" he was busy with the turbulent world of Shakespeare und the spiritualism. In "Les Travailleurs de la Mer", which is set in Guernsey, and "L'Homme que rit", which is set in England of the 17th century, he digested his new environment.

His beloved wife died in 1868. A common return to France wasn't possible. When the republic was proclaimed in 1878 Victor Hugo returned to Paris. In the same year he suffered a stroke, seven years later he died.His work was a typical product of the 19th century - full with noble aims and of a gigantic dimensions. ---Extract from his works:

Poems: Odes et ballades (1826), Les Orientales (1829), Les feuilles d'automne (1831), Les chants du crépuscule (1835), Les voix intérieures (1837), Les rayons et les ombres (1840), Les contemplations (1856), Les chansons des rues et des bois (1865), L'année terrible (1871), L'art d'être grand-père (1877), Les quatre vents de l'esprit (1881).

Poetry: Les châtiments (1853) La légende des siècles (1859,1876,1883)

Theater: Cromwell (1827), Hernani (1830), Ruy Blas (1838), Les Burgraves (1849).

Novels: Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Les misérables (1862), Les travailleurs de la mer (1866), Quatre-vingt-treize (1874).

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“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”

“What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul”

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.”

“The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.”

“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved --loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”

“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”

“People do not lack strength, they lack will.”

“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”

“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”

“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”

“Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.”

“Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it."

She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said t

o him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--

"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.”

“Imagination is intelligence with an erection.”

“Not being heard is no reason for silence.”

“Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.”

“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”

“You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.”

“When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.”

“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor a

nd there is invisible labor.”

“The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the fainthearted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal.”

“If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned!”

“An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.”

“He fell to the seat, she by his side. There were no more words. The stars were beginning to shine. How was it that the birds sing, that the snow melts, that the rose opens, that May blooms, that the dawns whitens behind the black trees on the shivering summit of the hills? One kiss, and that was all.

Both trembled, and they looked at each other in the darkness with brilliant eyes.

They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp ground, nor the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their hearts were full of thought. They had clasped hands, without knowing it.

She did not ask him; did not even think where and how he had managed to get into the garden. It seemed so natural to her that he should be there.

From time to time Marius’ knee touched Cosette’s. A touch that thrilled. At times, Cosette faltered out a word. Her soul trembled on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.

Gradually, they began to talk. Overflow succeeded to silence, which is fullness. The night was serene and glorious above their heads. These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their dreams, their frenzies, t

heir ecstasies, their chimeras, their despondencies, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each other. They had confided to each other in an intimacy of the ideal, which already, nothing could have increased, all that was most hidden and most mysterious in themselves. They told each other, with a candid faith in their illusions, all that love, youth and the remnant of childhood that was theirs, brought to mind. These two hearts poured themselves out to each other, so that at the end of an hour, it was the young man who had the young girl’s soul and the young girl who had the soul of the young man. They interpenetrated, they enchanted, they dazzled each other.

When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she laid her head on his shoulder, and asked him: "What is your name?"

My name is Marius," he said. "And yours?" My name is Cosette.”

“Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.”

“Those who do not weep, do not see.”

“Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”

“Before him he saw two roads, both equally straight; but he did see two; and that terrified him--he who had never in his life known anything but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory.”

“Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”

“Do you hear the people sing Lost in the valley of the night? It is the music of a people Who are climbing to the light.

For the wretched of the earth There is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest night will end And the sun will rise.”

“You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.”

“...Nobody knows like a woman how to say things that are both sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is Heaven.”

“There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom. ”

“To die for lack of love is horrible. The asphyxia of the soul.”

“Life's great happiness is to be convinced we are loved.”

“What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!”

“Let us say in passing, to be blind and to be loved, is in fact--on this earth where nothing is complete--one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. To have continually at your side a woman, a girl, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her, and because she cannot do without you, to know you are indispensable to someone necessary to you, to be able at all times to measure her affection by the degree of the presence that she gives you, and to say to yourself: She dedicates all her time to me, because I possess her whole love; to see the thought if not the face; to be sure of the fidelity of one being in a total eclipse of the world; to imagine the rustling of her dress as the rustling of wings; to hear her moving to and fro, going out, coming in, talking, singing, to think that you are the cause of those steps, those words, that song; to show your personal attraction at every moment; to feel even more powerful as your infirmity increases; to become in darkness, and by reason of darkness, the star around which this angel gravitates; few joys can equal that. The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves--say rather, loved in spite of ourselves; the conviction the blind have. In their calamity, to be served is to be caressed. Are they deprived of anything? No. Light is not lost where love enters. And what a love! A love wholly founded in purity. There is no blindness where there is certainty.”

“Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.”

“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”

“Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.”

“Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.”

“What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.”

“Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it. (pg. 231)”

“Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.”

“Love is the only future God offers.”

“I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.

“Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.”

“so long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on earth, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; so long as t

he three problems of the century - the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labour, the ruin of women by starvation and the atrophy of childhood by physical and spiritual night are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be a need for books such as this.”

“Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind. ”

“Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.”

“The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.”

“Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.”

“...We pray together, we are afraid together, and then we go to sleep. Even if Satan came into the house, no one would interfere. After all, what is there to fear in this house? There is always one with us who is the strongest. Satan may visit our house, but the good Lord lives here.”

“Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorably than love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; coffin, too. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all the things God has made, the human heart is the one that sheds most light, and alas! most night.”

“The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment’s silence, "Perhaps more so”

“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”

“...But listen, there will be more joy in heaven over the tears of a repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred just men.”

“Algebra applies to the clouds, the radiance of the star benefits the rose--no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great is small. All is balanced in necessity; frightening vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things, in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn, each needs the other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's beak breaking the egg, and it guides the birth of the earthworm, and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has a greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. The same promiscuity, and still more wonderful, between the things of the intellect and material things. Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to the point that the material world, and the moral world are brought into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling everything up in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dream from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light, and an element of

thought, disseminated and indivisible dissolving all, that geometric point, the self; reducing everything to the soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating--who knows, if only by the identity of the law--the evolutions of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the protozoa in the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last is the zodiac.”

“Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.”

“Plea Against the Death Penalty

Look, examine, reflect. You hold capital punishment up as an example. Why? Because of what it teaches. And just what is it that you wish to teach by means of this example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach that "thou shalt not kill"? By killing.

I have examined the death penalty under each of its two aspects: as a direct action, and as an indirect one. What does it come down to? Nothing but something horrible and useless, nothing but a way of shedding blood that is called a crime when an individual commits it, but is (sadly) called "justice" when society brings it about. Make no mistake, you lawmakers and judges, in the eyes of God as in those of conscience, what is a crime when individuals do it is no less an offense when society commits the deed.”

“If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.”

“He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends”

“...Can human nature be so entirely transformed inside and out? Can man, created by God, be made wicked by man? Can a soul be so completely changed by its destiny, and turn evil when its fate is evil? Can the heart become distorted, contract incurable deformities and incurable infirmities, under the pressure of disproportionate grief, like the spinal column under a low ceiling? Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish.”

“Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.”

“What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.”

“if people did not love one another, i really don't see what use there would be in having any spring.”

“There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.”

“What happened between those two beings? Nothing. They were adoring one another.”

“The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable m

an, should be so loved by this innocent being”

“It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.”

“The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.”

“Let us sacrifice one day to gain perhaps a whole life.”

“There is a determined though unseen bravery that defends itself foot by foot in the darkness against the fatal invasions of necessity and dishonesty. Noble and mysterious triumphs that no eye sees, and no fame rewards, and no flourish of triumph salutes. Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.”

“Common sense is in spite of, not the result of, education.”

“Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.”

“Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.... Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!”

“It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life”

“Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.”

“And do you know Monsieur Marius? I believe I was a little in love with you.”

“Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.”

“This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.”

“There must be a glowing light above such houses. The joy they contain must escape in light through the stones of the walls and shine dimly into the darkness. It is impossible that this sacred festival of destiny should not send a celestial radiation to the infinite. Love is the sublime crucible in which is consummated the fusion of man and woman; the one being, the triple being, the final being-- the human trinity springs from it. This birth of two souls into one space must be an emotion for space. The lover is priest; the apprehensive maiden submits. Something of this joy goes to God. Where there really is marriage, that is to say, where there is love, the ideal is mingled with it. A nuptial bed makes a halo in the darkness. Were it given to the eye of the flesh to perceive the fearful and enchanting sights of the superior life, it is likely that we should see the forms of night, the winged stranger, the blue travelers of the invisible, bending, a throng of shadowy heads, over the luminous house, pleased, blessing, showing to one another the sweetly startled m

aiden bride and wearing the reflection of the human felicity on their divine countenances. If at that supreme hour, the wedded pair, bewildered with pleasure, and believing themselves alone, were to listen, they would hear in their room a rustling of confused wings. Perfect happiness implies the solidarity of the angels. That obscure little alcove has for its ceiling the whole heavens. When two mouths, made sacred by love, draw near to each other to create, it is impossible, that above that ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill in the immense mystery of the stars.”

“I was dying when you came.”

“I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.”

“The soul gropes in search of a soul, and finds it. And that soul, found and proven, is a woman. A hand sustains you, it is hers; lips lightly touch your forehead, they are her lips; you hear breathing near you, it is she. To have her wholly, from her devotion to her pity, never to be left alone, to have that sweet shyness as, to lean on that unbending reed, to touch, Providence with your hands and be able to grasp it in your arms; God made palpable, what transport! The heart, that dark celestial flower, bursts into a mysterious bloom. You would not give up that shade for all the light in the world! The angel soul is there, forever there; if she goes away, it is only to return; she fades away in a dream and reappears in reality. You feel an approaching warmth, she is there. You overflow with serenity, gaiety, and ecstasy; you are radiant in your darkness. And the thousand little cares! The trifles that are enormous in this void. The most ineffable accents of the womanly voice used to comfort you, and replacing for you the vanished universe! You are caressed through the soul. You see nothing but you feel yourself adored. It is paradise of darkness.”

“...mothers are often fondest of the child which has caused them the greatest pain.”

“Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not experienced that. One could even say that the word is never a more magnificent mystery than when, within a man, it travels from his thought to his conscience and returns from his conscience to his thought. This is the only sense of the words, so often used in this chapter, “he said,” “he exclaimed”; we say to ourselves, we speak to ourselves, we exclaim within ourselves, without breaking the external silence. There is great tumult within; everything within us speaks, except the tongue. The realities of the soul, though not visible and palpable, are nonetheless realities.”

“One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.”

“It was SHE. Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meaning contained in the three letters of this word ‘she.”

“We must never fear robbers or murderers. They are dangers from outside, small dangers. It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejustice is the real robber, vice the real murderer. Why should we be troubled by a threat to our person or our pocket? What we have to beware of is the threat to our souls'.”

“He who despairs is wrong.”

“One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.”

“For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.”

“Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.”

“Morality is truth in full bloom.”

“England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England.”

“Each of our passions, even love, has a stomach that must not be overloaded. We must in everything write the word 'finis' in time; we must restrain ourselves, when it becomes urgent; we must draw the bolt on the appetite, play a fantasia on the violin, then break the strings with our own hand. The Wise man is he who knows when and how to stop.”

“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”

“ý"Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again."What love!" said the unhappy girl with a shudder.He resumed,--"The love of a damned soul.”

“Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he sat up, a long stream of blood rolled down his face, he raised both arms in air, looked in the direction whence the shot came, and began to sing.”

“The mother...swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood. ”

“Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.”

“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”

“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away. ”

“To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.”

“The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.”

“Faith is necessary to men; woe to him who believes in nothing!”

“The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real.”

“He did not study God; he was dazzled by him.”

“Be a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.”

“If anything is horrible, if there is a reality that surpasses our worst dreams, it is this: to live, to see the sun, to be in full possession of manly vigor, to have health and joy, to laugh heartily, to rush toward a glory that lures you on, to feel lungs that breathe, a heart that beats, a mind that thinks, to speak, to hope, to love; to have mother, wife, children, to have sunlight, and suddenly, in less time than it takes to cry out, to plunge into an abyss, to fall, to roll, to crush, to be crushed, to see the heads of grain, the flowers, the leaves, the branches, unable to catch hold of anything, to feel your sword useless, men under you, horses over you, to struggle in vain, your bones broken b

y some kick in the darkness, to feel a heel gouging your eyes out of their sockets, raging at the horseshoe between your teeth, to stifle, to howl, to twist, to be under all this, and to say, ‘Just then I was a living man!”

“Ah," cried Gavroche, "what does this mean? It rains again! ...If this continues, I withdraw my subscription.”

“where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice?”

“It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-sufficient we think it! How, being in possession of the false aim of life, happiness, we forget the true aim, duty!”

“Love is like a tree: it shoots of itself; it strikes it's roots deeply into our whole being, and frequently continues to put forth green leaves over a heart in ruins. And there is this unaccountable circumstance attending it, that the blinder the passion the more tenacious it is. Never is it stronger than when it is most unreasonable.”

“Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.”

“In fact, were it given to our human eye to see into the consciences of others, we would judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks. There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. Even in the gigantic and the ideal, the dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely from our innermost souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations, much more than in ideas, which are structured, studied, and compared, can we find the true character of each man. Our chimeras are most like us. Each of us dreams the unknown and the impossible according to his own nature.”

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night — are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot

be useless. Preface of Les Miserables”

“A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children."

from chapter VIII of Les Miserables”

“...Man lives by affirmation even more than he does by bread.”

“Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.”

“And must I now begin to doubt - who never doubted all these years? My heart is stone, and still it trembles. The world I have known is lost in the shadows. Is he from heaven or from hell? And does he know, that granting me my life today, this man has killed me, even so.

“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness. ”

“Monsieur' to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea; ignominy thirsts for respect.”

“There are things stronger than the strongest man...”

“The malicious have a dark happiness.”

“...It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.”

“To love beauty is to see light.”

“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions”

“The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.”

“The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being, and the extension of a single being until it reaches God - that is love. Love is the salute of the angels to the stars. How sad is the heart when rendered sad by love! How great is the void created by the absence of the being who alone fills the world.”

“The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.”

“The left-handed are precious; they take places which are inconvenient for the rest.”

“Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.”

“At least you are mine! Soon – in a few months, perhaps, my angel will sleep in my arms, will awaken in my arms, will live there. All your thought at all moments, all your looks will be for me; all my thought, all my moments,

all my looks will be for you!”

“When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.”

“Is there an infinite outside of us? Is this infinite, one, immanent, permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite, and because, if matter were lacking in it, it would in that respect be limited; necessarily intelligent, because it is infinite, and since if it lacked intelligence it would be to that extent, finite? Does this finite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we are able to attribute to ourselves the idea of existence only? In other words, it is not the absolute of which we are the relative? At the same time, while there is an infinite outside of us, is there not an infinite within us? These two infinities, do they not rest superimposed on one another? Does the second infinite not underlie the first, so to speak? It is not the mirror, the reflection, the echo of the first, an abyss concentric with another abyss? Is this second infinite intelligent, also? Does it think? Does it love? Does it will? If the two infinities are intelligent, each one of them has a principle of will, and there is a "me" in the infinite above, as there is a "me" in the infinite below. The "me" below is the soul; the "me" above is God.”

“Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! And do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He has done more--he has given you to me. And after having saved me, and after having given you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He has sacrificed himself. Behold the man. And he says to me the ingrate, to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty one: Thanks! Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet of this man would be too little. That barricade, that sewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all that he traversed for me, for thee, Cosette! He carried me away through all the deaths which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself. Every courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity he possesses! Cosette, that man is an angel!”

“To a gargoyle on the ramparts of Notre Dame as Esmeralda rides off with Gringoire Quasimodo says. "Why was I not made of stone like thee?”

“The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.”

“This is the shade of meaning: the door of a physician should never be closed; the door of a priest should always be open.”

“He was out there alone with himself, composed, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart to the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts that fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart as the flowers of night emit their perfume, lit like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding in ecstasy the midst of creation’s universal radiance, perhaps he could not have told what was happening in his own mind; he felt something floating away from him, and something descending upon him, mysterious exchanges of the soul with the universe.”

“...Human thought has no limit. At its risk and peril, it analyzes and dissects its own fascination. We could almost say that, by a sort of splendid reaction, it fascinates nature; the mysterious world surrounding us returns what it receives; it is likely that contemplators are contemplated.”

“These are true felicities. No joy beyond these joys. Love is the only ecstasy, everything else weeps”

“The memory of an absent person shines in the deepest recesses of the heart, shining the more brightly the more wholly its object has vanished: a light

on the horizon of the despairing, darkened spirit; a star gleaming in our inward night.”

“To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.”

“Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy. ”

“When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.”

“The owl goes not into the nest of the lark.”

“To pay compliments to the one we love is the first method of caressing, a demi-audacity venturing. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.”

“More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”

“Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man.'

Valjean, who did not recall having made any promise, was silent. The bishop had spoken the words slowly and deliberately. He concluded with a solemn emphasis:

Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

“The delight we inspire in others has this enchanting peculiarity that, far from being diminished like every other reflection, it returns to us more radiant than ever.”

“What makes night within us may leave stars.”

“...The first symptom of true love in a man is timidity, in a young woman, boldness.”

“Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery. ”

“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.”

“La vérité est comme le soleil, elle fait tout voir et ne se laisse pas regarder.”

“When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes”

“In this way, his unhappy soul struggled with its anguish. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity come together, He too, while the olive trees trembled in the fierce breath of the Infinite, had brushed away

the fearful cup that appeared before him, streaming with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths.”

“True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.”

“Be happy without picking flaws.”

“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.”

“There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.”

“Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?”

“Throughout the month of May, every night, in that poor, wild garden, under that shrubbery, each day, more perfumed and dense, two human beings composed of every chastity and every innocence, every flowing with all the felicities of Heaven, closer to archangels than men, pure, honest, intoxicated, radiant, glowed for each other in the darkness. It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to Marius that Cosette had a halo. They touched, they gazed at each other, they clasped hands, they pressed close together, but there was a distance they did not pass. Not that they respected it; they were ignorant of it. Marius felt a barrier, Cosette’s purity, and Cosette felt a support, Marius’ loyalty. The first kiss was also the last. Since then, Marius ha

d not gone beyond touching Cosette’s hand, or her scarf, or her curls, with his lips. Cosette was to him a perfume, not a woman. He breathed her. She refused nothing, and he asked nothing. Cosette was happy, and Marius was satisfied. They were living in that ravishing condition that might be called the dazzling of one soul by another. It was that ineffable first embrace of two virginities within the ideal. Two swans meeting on the Jung Frau.”

“A people, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.”

“Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' Talk is clouds, Table Talk is smoke."

Les Miserables”

“Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again.”

“Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the idea of duty, are things that, when in error, can turn hideous, but – even though hideous – remain great; their majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, persists in horror. They are virtues with a single vice – error. The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in an act of atrocity preserves some mournful radiance that inspires veneration. Without suspecting it, Javert, in his dreadful happiness, was pitiful, like every ignorant man in triumph. Nothing could be more poignant and terrible tha

n this face, which revealed what might be called all the evil of good. (pg. 291)”

“A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.”

“Ma vie est une énigme dont ton nom est le mot. (My life is an enigma, of which your name is the word.)”

“Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament.”

“But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.”

“There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.”

“You are adorable, mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope.”

“The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.”

“a compliment is like a kiss through a veil.”

“Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.”

“Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. ‘The Spirit is a garden,’ said he”

“Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.”

“Look not at the face, young girl, look at the heart. The heart of a handsome youngman is often deformed. There are hearts in which love does not keep. Young girl, the pine is not beautiful; it is not beautiful like the poplar, but it keeps its foliage in winter.”

“ A doctor’s door should never be closed, a priests door should always be open. ”

“This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure

in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.”

“The eye of a man should be still more reverent before the rising of a young maiden than before the rising of a star. The possibility of touch should increase respect. The down of the peach, the dust of the plum, the radiated crystal of snow, the butterfly’s wing powdered with feathers, are gross things beside that chastity that does not even know it is chaste. The young maiden is only the glimmer of a dream and is not yet statue. Her alcove is hidden in the shadows of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of the eye desecrates this dim penumbra. Here, to gaze, is to profane.”

“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves--say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”

“The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love.”

“Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us. ”

“The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.” ? Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

“A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.”

“He had but one consolation, that she had loved him, that her eyes had told him so, that although she did not know his name she knew his heart, and that perhaps, wherever she now was, in whatever undiscoverable place, she loved him still. Perhaps she even thought of him constantly as he did of her. Sometimes, in those unaccountable moments known to every lover, when the heart feels a strange stirring of delight although there is not cause for anything but grief, he reflected: 'It is her own thoughts that are reaching me!... And perhaps my thoughts are reaching her!'

Fancies such as these, which an instant later he brushed aside, nevertheless sufficed to kindle a glow in him which was something near to hope.”

“A library implies an act of faith.”

“Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do.”

“God knows better than we do what we need.”

“God will reward you,' he said. 'You must be an angel since you care for flowers.”

“For the rest, he was the same to all men, the fashionable world and the ordinary people. He judged nothing in haste, or without taking account of the c

irumstances. He said, 'Let me see how the fault arose.”

“He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.”

“He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.”

“There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust war.”

“An increase of tenderness always ended by boiling over and turning to indignation. He was at the point where we seek to adopt a course, and to accept what tears us apart.”

“Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.”

“Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes.”

“I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was threadbare - there were holes at his elbows; the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.”

“...The girls chirped and chatted like uncaged warblers. They were delirious with joy... Intoxications of life’s morning! Enchanted years! The wing of a dragonfly trembles! Oh, reader, whoever you may be, do you have such memories? Have you walked in the underbrush, pushing aside branches for the charming head behind you? Have you slid laughing, down some slope wet with rain, with the woman you loved?”

“He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.”

“For Marius to arrive at this flourishing condition had required years. Hard years, and difficult ones; those to get through, these to climb. Marius had never given up for a single day. He had undergone everything, in the shape of privation; he had done everything, except get into debt. He gave himself this credit, that he had never owed a sou to anybody. For him a debt was the beginning of slavery. He felt even that a creditor is worse than a master; for a master owns only your person, a creditor owns your dignity and can belabour that. Rather than borrow, he did not eat. He had had many days of fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet, and that if we do not take care, abasement of fortune may lead to baseness of soul, he watched jealously over his pride. Such a habit or such a carriage as, in any other condition, would have appeared deferential, seemed humiliating and he braced himself against it. He risked nothing, not wishing to take a backward step. He had a kind of stern blush upon his face. He was timid even to rudeness. In all his trials he felt encouraged and sometimes even upborne by a secret force within. The soul helps the body, and at certain moments uplifts it. It is the only bird which sustains its cage.”

“A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this monster existed.

“It so happens that this is particular love was precisely the sort best suited to the state of her soul. It was a sort of remote worship, a mute contemplation, a deification by an unknown votary. It was the apprehension of adolescence by adolescence, her dreams becoming romance ad remain in dream, the wished-for phantom realized at last and made flash, but still without name or wrong or fault, or need, or defect; in a word, a lover distant and ideal, a chimera having form. Any closer and more palpable encounter at this first stage would have terrified Cosette, still half buried in the magnifying mirage of the cloister. She had all the terrors of children and all the terrors of nuns mingled. The spirit of the convent, in which she had been steeped for five years, was still evaporating from her whole person, and made everything tremulous around her. In this condition, it was not a lover she needed, it was not even an admirer, it was a vision. She began to adore Marius as something charming, luminous, and impossible.”

“But I have been exposed, I am pursued - by myself! That is a pursuit that does not readily let go.”

“I think of winter, which is nothing but a rift in the firmament through which the winds break loose, the shreds of cloud over the hilltops in the new blue of the morning -- and dew-drops, those false pearls, and frost, that beauty powder, and mankind in disarray and events out of joint, and so many spots on the sun and so many craters in the moon and so much wretchedness everywhere -- when I think of all this I can't help feeling that God is not rich. He has the appearance of riches, certainly, but I can feel his embarrassment. He gives us a revolution the way a bankrupt merchant gives a ball. We must not judge any god by appearances. I see a shoddy universe beyond that splendour of the sky. Creation itself is bankrupt, and that's why I'm a malcontent.”

“Everybody has noticed the way cats stop and loiter in a half-open door. Hasn't everyone said to a cat: For heavens sake why don't you come in? With o

pportunity half-open in front of them, there are men who have a similar tendency to remain undecided between two solutions, at the risk of being crushed by fate abruptly closing the opportunity. The overprudent, cats as they are, and because they are cats, sometimes run more danger than the bold”

“The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me, the me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has a me. This me of the infinite is God.”

“I would rather be the head of a fly than the tail of a lion.”

“He therefore turned to mankind only with regret. His cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops who at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquillity and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him – he resembled them too closely for that. It was rather the rest of mankind that they jeered at. The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and kept watch over him. He would sometimes spend whole hours crouched before one of the statues in solitary conversation with it. If anyone came upon him then he would run away like a lover surprised during a serenade.”

“You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.”

“Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.”

“There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are

atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.”

“Press on! A better fate awaits thee.”

“where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?”

“We need those who pray constantly to compensate for those who do not pray at all.”

“Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?”

“Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.”

“Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.”

“...Though we chisel away as best we can at the mysterious block from which our life is made, the black vein of destiny continually reappears.”

“Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and

lyric. ”

“If they had had a different neighbour, one less self-absorbed and more concerned for others, a man of normal, charitable instincts, their desperate state would not have gone unnoticed, their distress-signals would have been heard, and perhaps they would have been rescued by now. Certainly they appeared utterly depraved, corrupt, vile and odious; but it is rare for those who have sunk so low not to be degraded in the process, and there comes a point, moreover, where the unfortunate and the infamous are grouped together, merged in a single fateful word. They are les miserables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?”

“You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness. We pardon to the extent that we love. Love is knowing that even when you are alone, you will never be lonely again. & great happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. Loved for ourselves. & even loved in spite of ourselves.”

“And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost--climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!--for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,--behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyo

nd the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.

Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. ”

“Demain, dès l'aube, à l'heure où blanchit la campagne, Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m'attends. J'irai par la forêt, j'irai par la montagne. Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.

Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées, Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit, Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées, Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.

Je ne regarderai ni l'or du soir qui tombe, Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur, Et quand j'arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.”

“Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on.”

“She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.”

“The barber in his shop, warmed by a good stove, was shaving a customer and casting from time to time a look towards this enemy, this frozen and brazen gamin, who had both hands in his pockets, but his wits evidently out of their sheath.”

“M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.”

“Love partakes of the soul itself. it is of the same nature. like it, it is a divine spark, like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable, it is the point of fire which is within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and nothing can extinguish.”

“Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.”

“Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots”

“The earth is a great piece of stupidity.”

“He who every morning plans the transactions of that day and follows that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.” ? Victor Hugo

“While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.' No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday. ”

“She loved with so much passion as she loved with ignorance. She did not know whether it were good or evil, beneficent or dangerous, necessary or accidental, eternal or transitory, permitted or prohibited: she loved.”

“The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribute that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What will spring up in a moment? Nobody knows. A burst of laughter starts from a scene of emotion. In a moment of buffoonery, the serious enters. Impulses depend on a chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign. A jest suffices to open the door to the unexpected. They are conferences with sharp turns, where the perspective suddenly changes. Chance is the director of these conversations.”

“Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.”

“The mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling or more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”

“Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with the other.”

“His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.”

“What was he doing during the trip? What was he thinking about? As he had during the morning, he watched the trees go by, the thatched roofs, the cultivated fields, and the dissolving views of the countryside that change at every turn of the road. Scenes like that are sometimes enough for the soul, and almost eliminate the need for thought. To see a thousand objects for the first and last time, what could be more profoundly melancholy? Traveling is a constant birth and death. It may be that in the murkiest part of his mind, he was drawing a comparison between these changing horizons and human existence. All aspects of life are in perpetual flight before us. Darkness and light alternate: after a flash, an eclipse; we look, we hurry, we stretch out our hands to seize what is passing; every event is a turn in the road; and suddenly we are old. We feel a slight shock, everything is black, we can make out a dark door, the gloomy horse of life that was carrying us stops, and we see a veiled and unknown form that turns him out into the darkness.”

“For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life. There is a determined though unseen bravery that defends itself foot by foot in the darkness agains the fatal invasions of necessity and dishonesty. Noble and mysterious triumphs that no eye sees and no fame rewards, and no flourish of triumph salutes. Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes. ”

“His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.”

“Certain forms are torn down, and it is well that they should be, but on condition that they are followed by reconstruction.”

“Cosette, in her seclusion, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire. Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, was slowly bringing these two beings near each other, fully charged and all languishing with the stormy electricities of passion,—these two souls which held love as two clouds hold lightning, and which were to meet and mingle in a glace like clouds in a flash.

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. The rest is only the rest, and comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls give each other in exchanging this spark.

At that particular moment when Cosette unconsciously looked with this glance which so affected Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he also had a glance which affected Cosette.”

“And so, being in Heaven, it was easy for him to lose sight of earth.”

“You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do no bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear.”

“Homo homini monstrum”

“The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.”

“For with love there is no middle course: it destroys, or else it saves. All human destiny is contained in that dilemma, the choice between destruction and salvation, which is nowhere more implacably posed than in love. Love is life, or it is death. It is the cradle, but also the coffin. One and the same impulse moves the human heart to say yes or no. Of all things God has created it is the human heart that sheds the brightest light and, alas, the blackest despair.”

“Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.”

“Men become accustomed to poison by degrees”

“Citizens, in the future there will be neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance, nor bloody retaliation. As there will be no more Satan, there will be no more Michael. In the future no one will kill any one else, the earth will beam with radiance, the human race will love. The day will come, citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it will come, and it is in order that it may come that we are about to die.”

“Books are cold but safe friends”

“A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.”

“If you are leaving that sorrowful place with hate and anger against men, you are worthy of compassion; if you leave it with good will, gentleness and peace, you are better than any of us.”

“Here we stop. On the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, a finger to his lips.”

“His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.”

“Desiring always to be in mourning, he clothed himself with night.”

“What I feel for you seems less of earth and more of a cloudless heaven.”

“Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Facts are one, ideas are the other.”

“A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.”

“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

“The soul in the darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness.”

“To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie.”

“Nothing is more dangerous than to stop working. It is a habit that can soon be lost, one that is easily neglected and hard to resume. A measure of day-dreaming is a good thing, like a drug prudently used; it allays the sometimes virulent fever of the over-active mind, like a cool wind blowing through the brain to smooth the harshness of untrammelled thought; it bridges here and there the gaps, brings things into proportion and blunts the sharper angles. But too much submerges and drowns. Woe to the intellectual worker who allows himself to lapse wholly from positive thinking into day-dreaming. He thinks he can easily change back, and tells himself that it is all one. He is wrong! Thought is the work of the intellect, reverie is its self-indulgence. To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse poison with a source of nourishment.”

“There is, we are aware, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, classified as pathologic, that denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness.”

“Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.”

“From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty”

“The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.”

“The peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had.”

“C'est une étrange prétention des hommes de vouloir que l'amour conduise quelque part”

“Quant au mode de prier, peu importe le nom, pourvu qu'il soit sincère. Tournez votre livre à l'envers et soyez à l'infini" As for how you pray, the words do not matter if they are sincere. Turn your prayer book upside down and face the infinite.”

“The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.”

“Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.”

“If we wish to be happy, monsieur, we must never comprehend duty; for, as soon as we comprehend it, it is implacable. One would say that it punishes you for comprehending it; but no, it rewards you for it; for it puts you into a hell where you feel God at your side.”

“What is called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, is generally fool's gold.”

“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself or more correctly being loved in spite of yourself.”

“The fact is that the beautiful, humanly speaking, is merely form considered in its simplest aspect, in its most perfect symmetry, in its most entire harmony with our make-up. Thus the ensemble that it offers us is always complete,

but restricted like ourselves. What we call the ugly, on the contrary, is a detail of a great whole which eludes us, and which is in harmony, not with man but with all creation. That is why it constantly presents itself to us in new but incomplete aspects.”

“The book the reader has now before his eyes - from one end to the other, in its whole and in its details, whatever the omissions, the exceptions, or the faults - is the march from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from brutality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; goal: the soul. Hydra at the beginning, angel at the end.” ? Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Argot is nothing more nor less than a wardrobe in which language, having some bad deed to do, disguises itself. It puts on word-masks and metaphoric rags.”

“...What pleases us in those who are rising is less pleasing in those who are falling. We do not admire the combat when there is no danger; and in any case, the combatants of the first hour alone have the right to be the exterminators in the last. He who has not been a determined accuser during prosperity should hold his peace in adversity. He alone who denounces the success has a right to proclaim the justice of the downfall.”

“In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.”

“No corruption is possible with the diamond.”

“The first proof of charity in a priest, especially a bishop, is poverty.”

“Reality in strong doses frightens.”

“To love or have loved is all-sufficing. We must not ask for more. No other pearl is to be found in the shadowfolds of life. To love is an accomplishment.”

“La suprema dicha de la vida, es la convicci?n de que se es amado; amado por s? mismo, digamos mejor, ama¬do a pesar de s? mismo.”

“Does there exist an Infinity outside ourselves? Is that infinity One, immanent and permanent, necessarily having substance, since He is infinite and if He lacked matter He would be limited, necessarily possessing intelligence since He is infinite and, lacking intelligence, He would be in that sense finite. Does this Infinity inspire in us the idea of essense, while to ourselves we can only attribute the idea of existence? In order words, is He not the whole of which we are but the part?”

“It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.”

“A fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.”

“Si tout autour de moi, est monotone et décoloré, n'y a-t-il pas en moi une tempête, une lutte, une tragédie?”

“Bonapartist democrat." "Grey shades of a quiet mouse colour.”

“He caught her, she fell, he caught her in his arms, he held her tightly unconscious of what he was doing. He held her up, though tottering himself. He felt as if his head were filled with smoke; flashes of light slipped through his eyelids; his thoughts vanished; it seemed to him that he was performing a religious act, and that he was committing a profanation. Moreover, he did not feel one passionate desire for this ravishing woman, whose form he felt against his heart. He was lost in love.”

“That men saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face. That men saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience.”

“He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being."

“No fear, no regrets.”

“And, moreover, when it happens that both are sincere and good, nothing will mix and amalgamate more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. In reality, they are the same kind of man. One has devoted himself to country upon earth, the other to his country in heaven; there is no other difference.”

“A soul for a piece of bread. Misery makes the offer; society accepts.”

“That's life" said the philosopher each time he was almost laid prostrate, "It's often our best friends who make us fall”

“At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette’s dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.”

“Relegated as he was to a corner and as though sheltered behind the billiard table, the soldiers, their eyes fixed upon Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order: 'Take aim!' when suddenly they heard a powerful voice cry out beside them, 'Vive la Republique! Count me in.'

Grantaire was on his feet. The immense glare of the whole combat he had missed and in which he had not been, appeared in the flashing eyes of the transfigured drunkard. He repeated, 'Vive la Republique!' crossed the room firmly, and took his place in front of the muskets beside Enjolras. 'Two at one shot,' he said. And, turning toward Enjolras gently, he said to him, 'Will you permit it?' Enjolras shook his hand with a smile. The smile had not finished before the report was heard. Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained backed up against the wall is if the bullets had nailed him there. Except that his head was tilted. Grantaire, struck down, collapsed at his feet.”

“Loving is almost a substitute for thinking. Love is a burning forgetfulness of all other things. How shall we ask passion to be logical?”

“Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing instruction for all and it must answer for the night with it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness. (Bishop of D)”

“Sikap hati-hati adalah anak sulung kebijaksanaan.”

“So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.

“There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher- the clergyman”

“Le mot tantôt comme un passant mystérieux de l'âme, tantot comme un polype noir de l'océan pensê.”

“His tavern sign bore witness to his feats of arms. He had painted it himself, being a Jack-of-all-trades who did everything badly.”

“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world , and that is an idea whose time has come”

“Protect the workers, encourage the rich.”

“He had not yet lived long enough to have discovered that nothing is more close at hand then the impossible, and that what must be looked for is always the unforeseen.”

“Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.”

“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.”

“...there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables”

“Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.”

“Supreme resources spring from extreme resolutions. Les Miserables, page 674”

“The reflection of a fact is in itself a fact.”

“Youth is the future smiling at a stranger, which is itself.”

“Kata-kata keras dan pedas menunjukkan alasan yang lemah.”

“I exist," murmurs someone whose name is Everyone. "I'm young and in love; I am old and I want rest; I work, I prosper, I do good business, I have houses to rent, money in State Securities; I am happy, I have wife and children; I like all these things and I want to go on living, so leave me alone."... There are moments when all this casts a deep chill on the large-minded pioneers of the human race.”

“The crowd mistrusts the allurement of paladins. The masses, ponderous bodies that they are, and fragile on account of their very heaviness, fear adventure; and there is adventure in the ideal.”

“Love is an old invention but it is one that is always new. Make the most of it.”

“M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.”

“Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, a

nd make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two.”

“He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign”

“Civil war... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as 'foreign war'? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers? Wars could only be defined by their aims. There were no 'foreign' or 'civil' wars, only wars that were just or unjust. Until the great universal concord could be arrived at, warfare, at least when it was the battle between the urgent future and the dragging past, might be unavoidable. How could such a war be condemned? War is not shameful, nor the sword-thrust a stab in the back, except when it serves to kill right and progress, reason, civilization, and truth. When this is war's purpose it maeks no difference whether it is civil or foreign war - it is a crime. Outside the sacred cause for justice, what grounds has one kind of war for denigrating another? By what right does the sword of Washington despise the pike of Camille Desmoulins? Which is the greater - Leonidas fighting the foreign enemy or Timoleon slaying the tyrant who was his brother? One was a defender, the other a liberator. Are we to condemn every resort to arms that takes place within the citadel, without concerning ourselves with its aim? ”

“Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder.” ? Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, Les Miserables; whose fault is it? And then, is it not when the fall is lowest that charity ought to be greatest?”

“If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?,’ she will answer, ‘He is my child.”

“Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.”

“There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. The dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely from the very bottom of our souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations towards the splendours of destiny. ”

“Il y a des gens qui paieraient pour se vendre”

“It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit. To the crowd, success wears almost the features of true mastery, and the greatest dupe of this counterfeit talent is History.”

“Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.”

“See Monsieur Geborand, buying a pennyworth of paradise.”

“According to an eastern fable, the rose was white when God created it, but when, as it unfolded, it felt Adam's eyes upon it, it blushed in modesty and turned pink.”

“Voyager, c'est naître et mourir à chaque instant.”

“Let us be like a bird for a moment perched On a frail branch when he sings;

Though he feels it bend, yet he sings his song, Knowing that he has wings.”

“The conflict between right and fact has endured since the origins of society. To bring the duel to an end, to consolidate the pure ideal with the human reality, to make the right peacefully interpenetrate the fact, and the fact the right, this is the work of the wise.”

“For prying into any human affairs, none are equal to those whom it does not concern.”

“He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.”

“It's that big guy who's the government.”

“...and if you fall as Lucifer fell, you fall in flames! And so it must be, for so it is written on the doorway to Paradise, that those who falter and those who fall must pay the price!”

“by making himself a priest made himself a demon.”

“. . . winter always carries with it something of our sadness; then April came, that daybreak of summer, fresh like every dawn, gay like every childhood; weeping a little sometimes like the infant that it is. Nature in this month has charming gleams which pass from the sky, the clouds, the trees, the fields, and the flowers, into the heart of man.”

“Happiness wishes everybody happy.”

“You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience. . . . You ask why I speak? I am neither informed against, nor pursued, nor hunte

d, say you. Yes! I am informed against! yes! I am pursued! yes! I am hunted! By whom? by myself. It is I myself who bar the way before myself, and I drag myself, and I urge myself, and I check myself and I exert myself, and when one holds himself he is well held.”

“Il possédait comme tout le monde sa terminaison en "iste", sans laquelle personne n'aurait pu vivre en ce temps-là, mais il n'était ni royaliste, ni bonapartiste, ni chartiste, ni orléaniste, ni anarchiste; il était bouquiniste.”

“The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.”

“Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.”

“The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple.”

“But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.”

“So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather

to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight.”

“Suffering engenders passion; and while the prosperous blind themselves, or go to sleep, the hatred of the unfortunate classes kindles its torch at some sullen or ill-constituted mind, which is dreaming in a corner, and sets to work to examine society. The examination of hatred is a terrible thing.”

“Let us never weary of repeating, that to think first of the disinherited and sorrowful classes; to relieve, ventilate, enlighten, and love them; to enlarge their horizon to a magnificent extent; to lavish upon them education in every shape; to set them an example of labor, and never of indolence; to lessen the weight of the individual burden by increasing the notion of the universal aim; to limit poverty without limiting wealth; to create vast fields of public and popular activity; to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the crushed and the weak; to employ the collective power in the grand task of opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude, and laboratories for every intellect; to increase wages, diminish toil, and balance the debit and credit--that is to say, proportion enjoyment to effort, and supply to demand; in a word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort, is (and sympathetic souls must not forget it) the first of brotherly obligations, and (let egotistic hearts learn the fact) the first of political necessities.”

Let us reflect, if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen.

The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake -- let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self.

Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves.”

Night and the day, when united, Bring forth the beautiful light.”

“Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.”

“Memories are our strength. When night attempts to return, we must light up the great dates, as we would light torches.”

“The first symptom of love in a young man is shyness; the first symptom in a woman, it's boldness.”

There is, we are aware, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, classified as pathologic, that denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness. To set up a theory that lacks a source of truth is an excellent example of blind assurance. And the odd part of it is the haughty air of superiority and compassion assumed toward the philosophy that sees God, by this philosophy that has to grope its way. It makes one think of a mole exclaiming, "How I pity them with their sun!" There are, we know, illustrious and powerful atheists; with them, the matter is nothing but a question of definitions, and at all events, even if they do not believe in God, they prove God, because they are great minds. We hail, in them, the philosophers, while, at the same time, inexorably disputing their philosophy.

The life of the cenobite is a human problem. When we speak of convents, those seats of error but innocence, of mistaken views but good intentions, of ignorance but devotion, of torment but martyrdom, we must nearly always say yes or no...The monastery is a renunciation. Self-sacrifice, even when misdire

cted, is still self-sacrifice. To assume as duty a strict error has its peculiar grandeur.

“History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.”

“One becomes gradually accustomed to poison.”

“To have lied is to have suffered.”

“Her soul trembled on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.”

“As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.”

“Could the word ‘iron’ be the root from which ‘irony’ is derived?”

“Oh! Everything I loved!”

“Are you afraid of the good you might do?”

“I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.”

“The right, indeed, is indestructible. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic. Kings waste their energies in that contention, and lose their honour. Sooner or later the submerged nation rises again to the surface; Greece is still Greece and Italy, Italy... The theft of a people can never be justified. These august swindles have no future. A nation cannot be shaped as though it were a pocket handkerchief.”

“People do not read stupidities with impunity.”

“Thought must always contain an element of desire, but there is none in dreaming. The dream, which is wholly spontaneous, adopts and preserves, even in our utmost flights of fancy, the pattern of our spirit; nothing comes more truly from the very depths of the soul than those unconsidered and uncontrolled aspirations to the splendours of destiny. It is in these, much more than in our reasoned thoughts, that a man's true nature is to be found. Our imaginings are what most resemble us. Each of us dreams of the unknown and the impossible in his own way.”

“An army is a strange contrivance in which power is the sum of a vast total of impotence.”

“The soul falls into contemplation before this sanctuary, where the celebration of love is held.”

“Desgraciado quien no haya amado mas que cuerpos, formas y apariencias. La muerte le arrebatara todo. Procurad amar las almas y un dia las volvereis a encontrar.”

“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”

“My greatness does not extend to this shelf.”

“He who has seen the misery of man only has seen nothing, he must see the misery of woman; he who has seen the misery of woman only has seen nothing, he must see the misery of childhood.”

“Well, listen a moment, Monsieur Mayor; I have often been severe in my life towards others. It was just. I did right. Now if I were not severe towards myself, all I have justly done would become injustice. Should I spare myself more than others? No. What! if I should be prompt only to punish others and not myself, I should be a wretched indeed! - Javert to M. Madeleine”

“He endeavored to collect his thoughts, but did not succeed. At those hours especially when we have sorest need of grasping the sharp realities of life do the threads of though snap off in the brain.”

thénardier 2 people liked it like“We may be indifferent to the death penalty and not declare ourselves either way so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when we do, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to choose sides, for or against... Death belongs to God alone.”

“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.”

“Love is a fault; so be it.”

“Fate, with its mysterious and inexorable patience, was slowly bringing toget

her these two beings charged, like thunder-clouds, with electricity, with the latent forces of passion, and destined to meet and mingle in a look as clouds do in a lightning-flash.

So much has been made in love-stories of the power of a glance that we have ended by undervaluing it. We scarcely dare say in these days that two persons fell in love because their eyes met. Yet that is how one falls in love and in no other way. What remains is simply what remains, and it comes later. Nothing is more real than the shock two beings sustain when that spark flies between them.”

“The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius...”

“He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.”

“Let no one misunderstand our idea; we do not confound what are called 'political opinions' with that grand aspiration after progress with that sublime patriotic, democratic, and human faith, which, in our days, should be the very foundation of all generous intelligence.”

“How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.”

“Running beer gathers no foam”

“There are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.” “When we reach out to pluck a flower the stem trembles, seeming both to shrink and to offer itself. The human body has something of this tremor at the moment when the mysterious hand of death reaches out to pluck a soul.”

“We may remain more or less open-minded on the subject of the death penalty, indisposed to commit ourselves, so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes.”

“When two mouths, made sacred by love, draw near to each other to create, it is impossible, that above that ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill in the immense mystery of the stars.”

“The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.”

“She worked in order to live, and presently fel in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger.”

“In our nineteenth century the religious idea is undergoing a crisis. Certain things have been unlearnt, and this is good, provided other things are learnt. There must be no void in the human heart.”

“No Prefect of Police believes that a cat can turn into a lion; nevertheless the thing happens...”

“I see black light (his last words)”

“Want de liefde is als een boom, die vanzelf groeit, zijn wortels diep uit doet lopen in heel ons wezen en die blijft uitlopen ook als het hart verbrijzeld is.”

“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.”

“That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in d

espite of humanity.”

“It does not do to let the senses fall asleep, whether in the shade of the sacred tree or in the shadow of an army.”

“Better than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”

“The sole social evil is darkness; humanity is identity, for all men are made of the same clay.”

“Misfortunes shared creates happiness.”

“The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.”

“Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less.”

“L’amour est une mer dont le femme est la rive.”

“Respirer Paris, cela conserve l'âme.”

“A creditor is worst than a master; for a master owns only your physical presence, whereas a creditor owns your dignity and may affront it.”

“What is fright by night is curiosity by day.”

“Civil war.... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as "fore

ign war"? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers?”

“He had not lived long enough to have discovered that nothing is more close at hand than the impossible, and what must be looked for is the unforeseen.”

“He believed that faith gives health. He sought to counsel and calm the despairing by pointing out the Man of Resignation, and to transform the grief that contemplates the grave by showing it the grief that looks up to the stars.”

“A torch-flame resembles the wisdom of cowards: it gives a poor light because it trembles.”

“Equality does not mean that all plants must grow to the same height - a society of tall grass and dwarf trees, a jostle of conflicting jealousies. It means, in civic terms, an equal outlet for all talents; in political terms, that all votes will carry the same weight; and in religious terms that all beliefs will enjoy equal rights.”

“The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand. The fact is that the beautiful, humanly speaking, is merely form considered in its simplest aspect, in its most perfect symmetry, in its most entire harmony with our make-up. Thus the ensemble that it offers us is always complete, but restricted like ourselves. What we call the ugly, on the contrary, is a detail of a great whole which eludes us, and which is in harmony, not with man but with all creation. That is why it constantly presents itself to us in new but incomplete aspects...”

“Large sums passed through his hands. Nevertheless, nothing changed his way of life or added the slightest luxury to his simple life.

Quite the contrary, As there is always more misery at the lower end than

humanity at the top, everything was given away before it was received, like water on parched soil. No matter how much money came to him, he never had enough. And then he robbed himself.”

“Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect on. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.”

“Look down and show some mercy if you can. Look down, look down, upon your fellow man.”

“It was all over with him. Marius loved a woman. His destiny was entering upon the unknown. ”

Sing, laugh; be happy, be famous; Each one of you will soon be in the darkness.”

“At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted on her lips, a kiss more burning than the red-hot iron of the executioner.”

“Common right is nought but the protection of all radiating over the right of each. This protection of all is termed Fraternity. The point of intersection of all these aggregated sovereignties is called Society. This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot. Hence comes what is called the social tie.”

“Equality, citizens, is not the whole of society on a level, a society of tall blades of grass and small oaks, or a number of entangled jealousies. It is, legally speaking, every aptitude having the same opportunity for a career; politically all consciences having the same right. Equality has an organ, grat

uitous and compulsory education. We must begin with the right to the alphabet.”

“Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again. "What love!" said the unhappy girl with a shudder. He resumed,--"The love of a damned soul.”

“Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.”

“Sleep comes more easily than it returns.”

“The utmost extremity of degradation is the obscene merriment to which it gives rise.”

“All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.”

“partir,c'est mourir un peu...”

“Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping.”

“It seemed as though he had for a soul the book of the natural law.”

“Flat ubi vult”

“We all know the artfulness with which a dropped coin hides itself, and the job we have to find it again. There are thoughts which play the same trick on us, rolling into a buried corner of our minds; and there it is, they've gone forever, we can't put our finger on them.”

“The peculiarity of prudery is to station the more sentries the less the fortress is menaced.”

“So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.”

“There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.”

“The four walls of the living redoubt had fallen, hardly could a quivering be detected here and there among the corpses; and thus the French legions, grander than the Roman legions, expired at Mont-Saint-Jean on ground soaked in rain and blood, in the somber wheatfields, at the spot where today at four in the morning, whistling, and gaily whipping up his horse, Joseph drives by with the mail from Nivelles.”

“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”

“A chair is not a caste.”

“C'è gente che pagherebbe per vendersi.”

“Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.”

“El futuro tiene muchos nombres. Para los débiles es lo inalcanzable. Para los temerosos, lo desconocido. Para los valientes es la oportunidad”

“To travel is to be born and to die at every instant; perhaps, in the vaguest region of his mind, he did make comparisons between the shifting horizon and our human existence: all the things of life are perpetually fleeing before us; the dark and bright intervals are intermingled; after a dazzling moment, an eclipse; we look, we hasten, we stretch out our hands to grasp what is passing; each event is a turn in the road, and, all at once, we are old; we feel a shock; all is black; we distinguish an obscure door; the gloomy horse of life, which has been drawing us halts, and we see a veiled and unknown person unharnessing amid the shadows.”

“God decreed that the love which came to Cosette was a love that saves.”

“Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.”

“Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.”

“All of you, all who are present--consider me worthy of pity, do you not? Good God! When I think of what I was on the point of doing, I consider that I am to be envied.”

“It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no moral element enters.”

“What precipices are sloth and pleasure! To do nothing is a sorry resolve to take; are you aware of that? To live in indolence on the goods of others, to be useless, that is to say, injurious! This leads straight to the depths of misery. Woe to the man who would be a parasite! He will become vermin! Ah, it does not please you to work! Ah, you have but one thought--to drink well, to eat well, and sleep well. You will drink water; you will eat black bread; you will sleep on a plank, with fetters riveted to your limbs, and you will feel their cold touch at night on your flesh!”

“The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral. All social questions achieve their finality around that blade. The scaffold is an image. It is not merely a framework, a machine, a lifeless mechanism of wood, iron, and rope. It is as though it were a being having its own dark purpose, as though the framework saw, the machine listened, and the mechanism understood; as though that arrangement of wood and iron and rope expressed a will. In the hideous picture which its presence evokes it seems to be most terribly a part of what it does. It is the executioner's accomplice; it consumes, devouring flesh and drinking blood. It is a kind of monster created by the judge and the craftsman; a spectre seeming to live an awful life born of the death it deals.”

“The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the chi

ld who has made them suffer most.”

“Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement. Knowledge is a viaticum. Though is a prime necessity; truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reasoning faculty, deprived of knowledge and wisdom, pines away. We should feel the same pity for minds that do not eat as for stomachs. If there be anything sadder than a body perishing for want of bread, it is a mind dying of hunger for lack of light. All progress tends toward the solution. Some day, people will be amazed. As the human race ascends, the deepest layers will naturally emerge from the zone of distress. The effacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation level.”

“In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.”

“Every man who has in his soul a secret feeling of revolt against any act of the State, of life, or of destiny, is on the verge of riot; and so soon as it appears, he begins to quiver, and to feel himself borne away by the whirlwind.”

“It is an error to imagine that fate can be exhausted, and that one has reached the bottom of anything whatever.”

“Then, with the barricades complete, the posts assigned, the muskets loaded, the lookouts placed, alone in these fearful streets in which there were now no pedestrians, surrounded by these dumb, and seemingly dead houses, which throbbed with no human motion, wrapped in the deepening shadows of the twilight, which was beginning to fall, in the midst of this obscurity and silence, through which they felt the advance of something inexpressibly tragic and terrifying, isolated, armed, determined, tranquil, they waited.”

“Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound and penetrating influence of nature knows this.”

“Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a finger -- that would suffice for my eternity!”

“What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion.”

“These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.”

“Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be the heir of his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen or twenty, in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was said that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed, though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and to gallantry.”

“With just the ‘Carmagnole’ to sing he will only overthrow Louis XVI; but gi

ve him the ‘Marseillaise’ and he will liberate the world. ”

“My fellow, you strike me at present as being situated in the moon, kingdom of dream, province of illusion, capital: Soap-Bubble.”

“La lumière est dans le livre. Ouvrez le livre tout grand. Laissez-le rayonner, laissez-le faire.”

“Tabahlah saat menghadapi penderitaan besar, Sabarlah saat menghadapi penderitaan kecil, Dan kalau anda sudah melaksanakan dengan giat tugas anda sehari-hari, Pergilah tidur dengan damai. Tuhan selalu berjaga.”

“Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.”

“Though one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one accepts the religion of the temple nearest at hand.”

“This Boulatruelle was a man in bad odour with the people of the neighbourhood; he was too respectful, too humble, prompt to doff his cap to everybody; he always trembled and smiled in the presence of the gendarmes, was probably in secret connection with robber-bands, said the gossips, and suspected of lying in wait in the hedge corners at nightfall. He had nothing in his favour except that he was a drunkard.”

“M. Myriel devait subir le sort de tout nouveau venu dans une petite ville où

il y a beaucoup de bouches qui parlent et fort peu de têtes qui pensent.”

“The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.”

“We will simply say here that, as a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer art. Rubens so understood it, doubtless, when it pleased him to introduce the hideous features of a court dwarf amid his exhibitions of royal magnificence, coronations and splendid ceremonial.

The universal beauty which the ancients solemnly laid upon everything, is not without monotony; the same impression repeated again and again may prove fatiguing at last. Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.

On the other hand, the grotesque seems to be a halting-place, a mean term, a starting-point whence one rises toward the beautiful with a fresher and keener perception. The salamander gives relief to the water-sprite; the gnome heightens the charm of the sylph.”

“With a remainder of that brotherly compassion which is never totally absent from the heart of a drinker, Phoebus rolled Jehan with his foot onto one of those poor man's pillows which Providence provides on all the street corners of Paris and which the rich disdainfully refer to as heaps of garbage.”

“La guerre, c'est la guerre des hommes; la paix c'est la guerre des idées.”

“Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.”

“The counterfeits of the past take assumed names, and are fond of calling themselves the future. That eternally returning spector, the past, not infrequently falsifies its passport.”

“Les bras d'une mère sont faits de tendresse et un doux sommeil benit l'enfant qui s'y abandonne.”

“Fex urbis, lex orbis" (The dregs of the city, the law of the earth), from Les Miserables, attributed to St. Jerome”

“Il n’y a rien de tel pour épier les actions des gens que ceux qu’elles ne regardent pas.”

“Rien n'est tel que le dogme pour enfanter le rêve. Et rien n'est tel que le rêve pour engendrer l'avenir. Utopie aujourd'hui, chair et os demain.”

“Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good.” ? Victor Hugo, Les Misérablestags: evil , good , law 1 person liked it like“The science of mathematics applies to the clouds; the radiance of starlight nourishes the rose; no thinker will dare say that the scent of hawthorn is valueless to the constellations... The cheese-mite has its worth; the smallest is large and the largest is small... Light does not carry the scents of earth into the upper air without knowing what it is doing with them; darkness confers the essence of the stars upon the sleeping flowers... Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision? You may choose.

A patch of mould is a galaxy of blossom; a nebula is an antheap of stars. There is the same affinity, if still more inconceivable, between the things of the mind and material things.”

“...any one who had listened to Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyes in 1817. Only, Courfeyrac was an honourable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyes was very great. The latent man which existed in the two was totally different in the first from what it was in the second. There was in Tholomyes a district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.”

“Do not ask the name of the person who asks you for a bed for a night. He whose name is a burden to him needs shelter more than any one.”

“The real threat to society is darkness.

Humanity is our common lot. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, at least here on earth, in the fate assigned to us. We come of the same void, inhabit the same flesh, are dissolved in the same ashes. But ignorance infecting the human substance turns it black, and that incurable blackness, gaining possession of the soul, becomes Evil.”

“The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in the event which thus set the bells and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment from early morning. It was neither an assault by the Picards nor the Burgundians, nor a hunt led along in procession, nor a revolt of scholars in the town of Laas, nor an entry of “our much dread lord, monsieur the king,” nor even a pretty hanging of male and female thieves by the courts of Paris. Neither was it the arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth century, of some plumed and bedizened embassy. It was barely two days since the last cavalcade of that nature, that of the Flemish ambassadors charged with concluding the marriage between the dau

phin and Marguerite of Flanders, had made its entry into Paris, to the great annoyance of M. lé Cardinal de Bourbon, who, for the sake of pleasing the king, had been obliged to assume an amiable mien towards this whole rustic rabble of Flemish burgomasters, and to regale them at his Hôtel de Bourbon, with a very “pretty morality, allegorical satire, and farce,” while a driving rain drenched the magnificent tapestries at his door.”

“l riso è il sole che scaccia l'inverno dal volto umano.”

“Do what we may to shape the mysterious stuff of which our lives are composed, the dark threads of our destiny will always re-emerge.”

“So bring me this man, trembling and shivering from head to foot; let me fall into his arms or down at his knees; he will weep and we shall weep, he will be eloquent and I shall be comforted, and my heart shall melt into his, he will take my soul, and I his God.

But what is this kindly old gentleman to me? And what am I to him? Just one more member of the race of unfortunates, one more shade to go with the many he has seen, one more figure to add to his total of executions.”

“...the cold and bitter scorn of the passers-by penetrated her very flesh and soul like a north wind.”

“An opulent priest is a contradiction.”

“The reader will pardon us another little digression; foreign to the object of this book but characteristic and useful . . . .”

“The barber ran to the broken window, and saw Gavroche, who was running with all his might towards the Saint Jean market. On passing the barber's shop, Gavroche, who had the two children on his mind, could not resist the desire to bid him "good day", and had sent a stone through his sash. "See!" screamed the barber, who from white had become blue, "he makes mischief. What has anybody done to this Gamin?”

“But that which pleases us in people who are rising pleases us less in the case of people who are falling.”

“Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling began to affect the netting under which the three children lay.

It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This was accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.

The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, and chilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder brother had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the little one, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but in a very low tone, and with bated breath:--

"Sir?"

"Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

"What is that?"

"It's the rats," replied Gavroche.

And he laid his head down on the mat again.

The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have already mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long as

it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the same as their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the good story-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat," they had hurled themselves in throngs on Gavroche's tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begun to bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.

Still the little one could not sleep.

"Sir?" he began again.

"Hey?" said Gavroche.

"What are rats?"

"They are mice."

This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen white mice in the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless, he lifted up his voice once more.

"Sir?"

"Hey?" said Gavroche again.

"Why don't you have a cat?"

"I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they ate her."

This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little fellow began to tremble again.

The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:--

"Monsieur?"

"Hey?"

"Who was it that was eaten?"

"The cat."

"And who ate the cat?"

"The rats."

"The mice?"

"Yes, the rats."

The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which ate cats, pursued:--

"Sir, would those mice eat us?"

"Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche.

The child's terror had reached its climax. But Gavroche added:--

"Don't be afraid. They can't get in. And besides, I'm here! Here, catch hold of my hand. Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!”

“He who has not been a stubborn accuser in prosperity should hold his peace in the face of ruin.”

“Die Wissenschaft muss mit glatten Wangen begonnen werden und nicht erst mit runzeligen, wenn man in ihr etwas erreichen will.”

“To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just.”

“My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should liked to be wholly a beast like that goat. - Quasimodo”

“That night, before going to bed, he went on to say, 'Never be afraid of thieves and murderers. They represent the dangers without, which are not worth worrying about. Be afraid of ourselves. Prejudices are the real thieves, vices are the murderers. The greatest dangers are within us. Who cares who threatens our heads or our purses! Let's think only of what threatens our souls.”

“One day—when the emperor had come to call on his uncle the cardinal—our worthy priest happened to be waiting as his Majesty went by. Noticing that the old man looked at him with a certain curiosity, Napoleon turned around and said brusquely, ‘Who is this good man looking at me?’ ‘Sire,’ replied M. Myriel, “you are looking at a good man, and I at a great one. May we both be the better for it.” That evening the emperor asked the cardinal the priest’s name, Still later, M. Myriel was totally surprised to learn he had been appointed Bishop of Digne.”

“Madame Magloire sometimes called him ‘Your Highness.’ One day, rising from his armchair, he went to his library for a book. It was on one of the upper shelves, and as the bishop was rather short, he could not reach it. ’Madame Magloire,’ said he, ‘bring me a chair. My highness cannot reach that shelf.”

“M. de Salaberry was not amused.”

“As we have explained, in first love the soul is taken long before the body; later, the body is taken long before the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all.”

“What is the cat?” he exclaimed. “It is a corrective. God, having made the mouse, said, ‘I’ve made a blunder.’ And he made the cat. The cat is the errat

um of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, Is the revised and corrected proof of creation.”

“He had given Cosette a dress of Binche lace that had come down to him from his own grandmother. “These fashions have come round again,” he said, “old things are all the rage, and the young women of my old age dress like the old women of my childhood,”

“With Cosette’s garter, Homer would make the Iliad. He would put into his poem an old babbler like me, and he would call him Nestor.”

“Il dort. Quoique le sort fut pour lui bien étrange, Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n’eut plus son ange. La choise simplement d’elle-même arriva. Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s’en va.

He is asleep. Though his mettle was sorely tried, He lived, and when he lost his angel, died. It happened calmly, on its own. The way night comes when day is done.”

The song died away. It may have lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could not have told. Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.”

“Kebahagiaan terbesar di dunia ialah merasa yakin kita dicintai.”

“What a transfiguration it is to love! And the little shrieks, the pursuits in the grass, the waists encircled by stealth, the jargon that is melody, the adoration that breaks through in the way a syllable is said, those cherries snatched form one pair of lips by another - It all catches fire and turns into celestial glories.”

“It's not enough to abolish abuse; custom must also be transformed. The mill was pulled down, but the wind still blows.”

“Win a lottery-prize and you are a cleaver man. Winners are adulated. To be born with a caul is everything; luck is what matters. Be fortunate and you will be thought great.”

“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. The writer doubles and trebles the power of writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people.”

“Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voices of reason can be heard.”

“Le suprême bonheur dans la vie,c'est la conviction qu'on est aimé..”

“To understand the nature of the Revolution we must call it "progress"; and we may define progress by the word "tomorrow".”

“To attempt, to brave, to persist, and persevere, to be faithful to one's self, to wrestle with destiny, to astound the catastrophe by the slight fear which is causes us, now to confront unjust power, again to insult intoxicated victory, to hold firm and withstand -- such is the example which nations need and the light which electrifies them.”

“This cavern is below all, and the enemy of all; it is hatred, without exception.”

“A room where one merely goes to bed costs twenty sous but a room where one retires may cost twenty francs.”

“Najve?a sre?a ?ivota je ube?enje da smo voljeni zbog nas samih, ili jo? bolje, uprkos nas samih.”

“You who are Prejudice, Abuse, Ignominy, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, beware of the wide-eyed urchin. He will grow up.”

“The world is like Olympus - even a thief is accepted in it if he is also a god.”

“Am I not as much a doctor as they? I too have my patients; in the first place, theirs, whom they call sick; and then my own, whom I call unfortunate.”

“Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.”

“Above all, you can believe in Providence in either of two ways, either as thirst believes in the orange, or as the ass believes in the whip.”

“We are never done with conscience. Choose your course by it, Brutus; Choose your course by it, Cato. It is bottomless, being God. We cast in to this pit the labor of our whole lives, we cast in our liberty or our country, we cast in our well-being, we cast in our repose, we cast in our happiness. More!

more! more! Empty the vase! turn out the urn! We must at last cast in our heart. ”

“In principle any revolt strengthens the government it fails to overthrow.”

“I didn't believe it could be so monstrous. It's wrong to be so absorbed in divine law as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men tough that unknown thing?”

“Åä ÇáÔÎÕ ÇáÐí íÑÓã ÇáÎØæØ ÇáÚÑíÖÉ áãÚÇãáÇÊå ÇáíæãíÉ¡ æíÊÈÚ åÐå ÇáÎØæØ¡ íÊÈÚ ãÓÇÑÇ ÓíÏáå Úáì ÇáÓÈíá ááÎÑæÌ ãä ÃßËÑ ÃäãÇØ ÇáÍíÇÉ ÇÒÏÍÇãÇ. æáßä ÚäÏãÇ áÇ ÊæÖÚ ÎØÉ ãÍÏÏÉ¡ æÚäÏãÇ íÊÑß ÇáæÞÊ ÊäÝÞå ÇáÕÏÝ¡ ÝÓÑÚÇä ãÇ ÓÊåíãä ÇáÝæÖì” ? Victor Hugo0 people liked it like“Chi non ha nulla da rimproverarsi, non rimprovera altrui.” ? Victor Hugotags: l-uomo-che-ride 0 people liked it like“Il destino ci porge talvolta da bere un calice di follia. Una mano esce dalla nuvola e ci offre cos? di punto in bianco la tetra coppa dov'è l'ebbrezza sconosciuta” ? Victor Hugotags: l-uomo-che-ride 0 people liked it like“Maintenant je suis captif. Mon corps est aux fers dans un cachot, mon esprit est en prison dans une id�ee. Une horrible, une sanglante, une implacable id�ee! Je n'ai plus qu'une pens�e, qu'une conviction, qu'une certitude: condamne� a mort!” ? Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man0 people liked it like“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves — say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” ? Victor Hugo

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