Victor Hugo

Appointed Pair de France. (1845)

Had a mistress, Juliette Gauvain (aka Juliette Drouet), for 50 years, although he had many other affairs. He escaped sentencing for adultery in 1845 by royal pardon. His wife, Adle, became involved with critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve shortly after their marriage, although the nature of the relationship is uncertain.

His brother, Eugne, went mad when Hugo married Adle Fourcher, whom the brothers had known since childhood and whom Eugne was secretly in love with. He died at Charenton Asylum on 20 February 1837.

"Les Misrables" is the source for 48 operas; "Notre Dame de Paris" (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) is the source for 16 operas.

Mortified to be descended from commoners - his father was a soldier who rose to be a general in Napolon Bonaparte s army; his mother was the daughter of a sea captain - he "adopted" more illustrious Hugo ancestors, and designed a crest for himself with the words "Ego Hugo."

Children: Lopold (16 July - 10 October 1823); Lopoldine (28 August 1824 - 4 September 1843); Charles (4 November 1826 - 13 March 1871); Franois-Victor (28 October 1828 - 26 December 1873); Adle (24 August 1830 - 21 April 1915). Some biographers give Charless birth date as 3 November 1826, and Adles as 28 July 1830. Adles unrequited love for an English soldier was the basis of the film Lhistoire dAdle H. .

He was at the bedside of Honor de Balzac when he died.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche included Hugo in his list of "impossible people", describing him as "a lighthouse in a sea of absurdity."

In 1848, he announced his candidacy for president of the French Republic, but he got very few votes.

He won a seat in the National Assembly in 1871, but soon resigned out of frustration with the political process.

In 1884, just months before his death, Hugo visited the massive construction site of The Statue of Liberty. He was said to be impressed and said "The idea, it is everything.".

His remains were interred at the Pantheon in Paris, France.

In addition to having been adapted into a hit stage musical, Les Miserables has also been the basis for two hit television series. Roy Higgins modeled Richard Kimble, the main character of The Fugitive, on Jean Valjean. His pursuer, Gerard, was so named because it sounded similar to Javert. This was also used as the basis for Dr. Banner moving from town to town in The Incredible Hulk, with Javert as the basis for his pursuer, journalist Jack McGee.

The appearance of Gwynplaine, the hero of The Man Who Laughs; especially as portrayed by Conrad Veidt , was the inspiration for the appearance of Batmans greatest enemy, The Joker.

The publication of Les Miserables led to the shortest ever correspondence at that point in history. Hugo was in England when it was published, and therefore didnt know how successful it would be. His single-character telegraph to his publisher was simply a question mark, signifying that he was asking how the publication was going. His publisher indicated it was a hit with a single-character response: an exclamation point.

His novel Les Miserables became a hit among Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War. In fact, in reference to the novel, they often referred to themselves as "Lees Miserables." Ironically, Hugo was anything but a southern sympathizer. He wrote a strongly worded public letter condemning the U.S. government for the then-pending execution of abolitionist John Brown, and even created a painting of the tragic event itself.

Was a personal favorite of Ayn Rand , who was inspired to become a writer from reading his books.

Pantheon, Paris, France

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible,to be silent.

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

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has,come.

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

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Nothing awakens a reminiscence like an odor.

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has,the grander view?,To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have,used and which is in danger of being lost--that is to say, one of the,elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated,civilization--is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve,civilization.

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

Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

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

[on bravery] 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.

[on the future] There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.

To die is nothing. Not to live is frightful.

Not being heard is no reason for silence.

A writer is a World trapped inside a person.

Common sense is in spite of, not because of, Education.

The Devil may visit us, but God lives here.

The Paradise of the Rich is made from the Hell of the Poor.

Music is noise that thinks.

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

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,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.

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.

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

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.

Love is the only future God offers.

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

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.

Not being heard is no reason for silence.

Those who do not weep, do not see.

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

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

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

When the heart is dry the eye is dry.

where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?,Sin is a gravitation.

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

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.

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

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 man, should be so loved by this innocent being.

He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with 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 which fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.

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

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?,. . . 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.

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.

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn. " (1872),Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.

As for methods of prayer, all are good, as long as they are sincere.

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

Be happy without picking flaws.

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.

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.

Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were trembling for the health of one who is dear to you, today you fear for your own; tomorrow it will be an anxiety about money, the next day the slanders of a calumniator, the day after the misfortune of a friend; then the weather, then something broken or lost, then a pleasure for which you are reproached by your conscience or your vertebral column; another time, the course of public affairs. Not to mention heartaches. And so on. One cloud is dissipated, another gathers. Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small number who are lucky! As for other men, stagnant night is upon them.

In moments like these, offering up his heart at the hour that night flowers offer up their perfume, lit up like a lamp in the middle of the starry night, full of ecstasy in the middle of the universal radiance of creation, he could not perhaps have said himself what was happening in his spirit; he felt something soar up out of him and something fly down into him. Mysterious exchanges between the bottomless well of the soul and the bottomless well of the universe!,There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live.

In joined hands there is still some token of hope, in the clinched fist none.

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.

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.

Un sceptique qui adhère à un croyant cela est simple comme la loi des couleurs complémentaires. Ce qui nous manque nous attire.

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

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

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.

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.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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

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.

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, gratuitous and compulsory education. We must begin with the right to the alphabet.

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.

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the,Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.

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.

In love there are no friends everywhere where there is a pretty woman hostility is open.

Release is not the same as liberation. You get out of jail, all right, but you never stop being condemned.

Certainly, I approve of political opinions, but there are people who do not know where to stop.

The senator. . . was a smart man who had made his way in life with a single-mindedness oblivious to any of those stumbling blocks known as conscience, sworn oaths, justice, duty. . .

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

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

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

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.

Style is the shape the ideal takes, rhythm, its movement.

Without seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, he gazed upon it. He did not study God; he was dazzled by Him.

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.

People do not read stupidities with impunity.

Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

The best minds have their soft spots and sometimes feel somewhat bruised by the scant respect of logic.

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

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.

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.

On coming out of the chapel, a well can be seen on the left. There are two in this yard. You ask, Why is there no bucket and no pulley to this one? Because no water is drawn from it now. Why is no more water drawn from it? Because it is full of skeletons.

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

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.

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.

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

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.

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

Lend your ear then to this tutti of steeples; diffuse over the whole the buzz of half a million of human beings, the eternal murmur of the river, the infinite piping of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed like immense organs on the four hills of the horizon; soften down, as with a demi-tint, all that is too shrill and too harsh in the central mass of sound, and say if you know any thing in the world more rich, more gladdening, more dazzling than that tumult of bells; than that furnace of music; than those ten thousand brazen tones breathed all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high; than that city which is but one orchestra; than that symphony rushing and roaring like a tempest.

In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there is something of everything; there is bravery, youth, honor, enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the eager fury of the gamester, and above all, intervals of hope.

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

A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.

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. HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862. [Translation by Isabel F. Hapgood],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.

The sins of women and children, domestic servants and the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the sins of the husbands and fathers, the masters, the strong and the rich and the educated.

Those who are ignorant should be taught all you can teach them; society is to blame for not providing free public education; and society will answer for the obscurity it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sin will be committed. The guilty party is not he who has sinned but he who created the darkness in the first place.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are done, we recognize one thing: that the human race has been badly manhandled, but that it has moved forward.

He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601.

That it was no doubt a dark hour, but that he should get through it; that after all he held his destiny, evil as it might be, in his own hand; that he was master of it. He clung to that thought.

Where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the junction between those who think and those who suffer; this barricade is made neither of paving stones, nor of timbers, nor of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound of ideas and a mound of sorrows. Here misery encounters the ideal. Here day embraces night, and says: I will die with you and you will be born again with me. From the heavy embrace of all desolations springs faith. Sufferings bring their agony here, and ideas their immortality. This agony and immortality will mingle and make up our death. Brothers, whoever dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a grave illuminated by the dawn.

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

Loving is half of believing.

He did not seek to assume the mantle of Elijah, to shed a light of the future upon the misty turmoil of events or resolve the prevailing light into a single flame; there was in him nothing of the prophet or the mystic. He was a simple soul who loved, and that was all.

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.

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.

His ideas assumed a kind of stupefied and mechanical quality which is peculiar to despair.

He was troubled; this brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud in this crystal.

What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. 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.

People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: 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.

Make thought a whirlwind.

He sought. . . to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars.

Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth.

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

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

Death belongs only to God. What right have men to lay hands on a thing so unknown?,With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How many men resemble the nettle!" He added with a pause: "Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.

What makes night within us may leave stars.

Ecclesiastes names thee Almighty, the Maccabees name thee Creator, the Epistle to the Ephesians names thee Liberty, Baruch names thee Immensity, the Psalms name thee Wisdom and Truth, John names thee Light, the Book of Kings names thee Lord, Exodus names thee Providence, Leviticus Sanctity, Esdras Justice, creation names thee God, man names thee Father; but Solomon names thee Compassion, which is the most beautiful of all thy names.

If they had had a different neighbour, one less sel-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 world. They are les misérables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need for charity?,This is the shade of difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of the priest should always be open.

What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant. . .

His brain was in one of those states that are both violent and yet frighteningly calm, in which thought runs so deep it blots out reality. You no longer see the objects around you, yet you can see the shapes in your mind as thought they are outside your body.

Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how much better everything would go!,The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.

It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory,It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past.

As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.

These two beings, who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching a love, and who had lived so long for each other, were now suffering beside one another and through one another; without speaking of it, without harsh feeling, and smiling all the while.

That I may carry on what I have begun, that I may do good, that I may be one day a grand and encouraging example that it may be said that there was finally some little happiness resulting from this suffering which I have undergone and this virtue to which I have returned!,The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.

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.

Monsieur Bienvenu was simply a man who accepted these mysterious questions. . . and who had in his soul a deep respect for the mystery which enveloped them.

I have an old hat which is not worth three francs, I have a coat which lacks buttons in front, my shirt is all ragged, my elbows are torn, my boots let in the water; for the last six weeks I have not thought about it, and I have not told you about it. You only see me at night, and you give me your love; if you were to see me in the daytime, you would give me a sou!,Cosette, by learning that she was beautiful, lost the grace of not knowing it; an exquisite grace, for beauty heightened by artlessness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as dazzling innocence, going on her way, and holding in her hand, all unconsciousness, the key of a paradise.

He had to accept the fate of every newcomer to a small town where there are plenty of tongues that gossip and few minds that think.

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.

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

Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.

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

A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in--what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.

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.

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

210Suffering 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. ”Suffering begets rage, and while the prosperous turn a blind eye, or nod off which is always the same thing as shutting your eyes, the hate of the unprosperous masses has hits torch lit by some malcontent or warped mind dreaming away in a corner, somewhere, and it begins to examine society. Examination by hate is a terrible thing.

He was fine; he, that orphan that foundling that outcast; he felt himself august and strong; he looked full in the face that society from which he was banished, and into which he had so powerfully intervened; that human justice from which he had snatched its prey; all those tigers whose jaws perforce remained empty; those myrmidons, those judges, those executioners, all that royal power which he, poor, insignificant being, had foiled with the power of God.

Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest.

Teach the ignorant as much as you can. Society is to blame for not giving free education: it is responsible for the darkness it creates. the soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness,The goodness of the mother is written in the gaiety of the child.

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

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

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

I am come to warn you. I am come to impeach your happiness. It is fashioned out of the misery of your neighbour. You have everything, and that is composed of the nothing of others… As for me, I am but a voice. Mankind is a mouth, of which I am the cry. You shall hear me!,I am he who cometh out of the depths. My lords, you are great and rich. There lies your danger. You profit by the night; but beware! The dawn is all-powerful. You cannot prevail over it. It is coming. Nay! it is come. Within it is the day-spring of irresistible light. And who shall hinder that sling from hurling the sun into the sky. The sun I speak of is Right. You are Privilege. Tremble!,First of all, I wish you love, and that by loving you may also be loved. But if it’s not like that, be brief in forgettingAnd after you’ve forgotten, don’t keep anything.

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.

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.

Darks drifts covered the horizon. A strange shadow approaching nearer and nearer, was spreading little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shadow which came from indignations and from systems. All that had been hurriedly stifled was stirring and fermenting. Sometimes the conscious of the honest man caught its breath, there was so much confusion in that air in which sophisms were mingled with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of the storm. The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance-comer, thought unknown, flashed out. Then the twilight darkness fell again. At intervals, deep and sullen mutterings enabled men to judge of the amount of lightning in the cloud.

After he had fully determined that the young man was at the bottom of this state of affairs, and that it all came from him, he Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had laboured so much upon his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all misfortune into love; he looked within himself, and there he saw a spectre, Hatred.

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

The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.

for men felt therein the presence of that great human thing which is called law, and that great divine thing which is called justice.

Because things are not agreeable," said Jean Valjean, "that is no reason for being unjust towards God.

One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader in to a nuptial chamber, not into a virginal chamber. Verse would hardly venture it, prose must not. It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is whiteness in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily, which must not be gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not gazed upon it. Woman in the bud is sacred. That innocent bud which opens, that adorable half-nudity which is afraid of itself, that white foot which takes refuge in a slipper, that throat which veils itself before a mirror as though a mirror were an eye, that chemise which makes haste to rise up and conceal the shoulder for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing vehicle, those cords tied, those clasps fastened, those laces drawn, those tremors, those shivers of cold and modesty, that exquisite affright in every movement, that almost winged uneasiness where there is no cause for alarm, the successive phases of dressing, as charming as the clouds of dawn,—it is not fitting at all that all this should be narrated, and it is too much to have even called attention to it.

Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.

Sin as little as possible-that is the law of mankind. Not to sin at all is the dream of the angel. All earthly things are subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.

To be a saint is to be an exception; to be a true man is the rule. Err, fail, sin if you must, but be upright. To sin as little as possible is the law for men; to sin not at all is a dream for angels. All earthly things are subject to sin; if is like the force of gravity.

To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.

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

Hope is the Word which God has written on the brow of every man.

Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded. Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,—this is the very struggle of progress.

In that pallid and sullen shadow in which he crawled, whenever he turned his head and endeavoured to raise his eyes, he saw, with mingled rage and terror, forming, massing, and mounting up out of sight above him with horrid escarpments, a kind of frightful accumulation of things, of laws, of prejudices, of men, and of acts, the outlines of which escaped him, the weight of which appalled him, and which was no other than that prodigious pyramid that we call civilization.

The principle is twofold, do not forget. The book, as a book, belongs to the author, but as a thought, it belongs – the word is not too extreme – to the human race. All intelligences, all minds, are eligible, all own it. If one of these two rights, the right of the writer and the right of the human mind, were to be sacrificed, it would certainly be the right of the writer, because the public interest is our only concern, and that must take precedence in anything that comes before us.

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,A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.

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.

Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. To replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.

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.

The shadow of the passions of the moment transversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things.

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

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.

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

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.

France bleeds, but liberty smiles, and before the smile of liberty, France forgets her wound.

The true division of humanity is this: the luminous and the dark. To diminish the number of the dark, to increase the number of the luminous, there is the aim. That is why we cry: education, knowledge! to learn to read is to kindle a fire; every syllable spelled sparkles. But whoever say light does not necessarily say joy. There is suffering in light; an excess burns. Flames is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius,Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material amelioration. . . If three is anything more poignant than a body agonizing for want of bread, it is a soul dying of hunger for light.

It is wrong to become absorbed in the divine law to such a degree as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing?,An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.

He was fond of saying, "There is a bravery of the priest as well as the bravery of a colonel of dragoons,--only," he added, "ours must be tranquil.

I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

One day of happiness is worth more than a lifetime of sorrow . . . . Under ordinary circumstances, jealousy is a suspicion to the person who excites it and degrading to the person who indulges it.

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

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.

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.

At the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of revolution, was Combeferre, representing its philosophy. The difference between logic and philosophy is that one can decide upon war, whereas the other can only be fulfilled by peace.

Revolution is the accession of the peoples, and, at the bottom, the People is Man.

In the future no one will kill anyone, the earth will shine, the human race will love. It will come, citizens, the day when all will be peace, harmony, light, joy, and life, it will come. And it is so that it comes that we are going to die.

Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad. Every barricade seems a crime. Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout to them: “You are tearing up the pavements of hell!” They might reply: “That is because our barricade is made of good intentions.

He was Antinous, wild. You would have said, seeing the thoughtful reflection of his eye, that he had already, in some preceding existence, been through the revolutionary apocalypse. He knew its tradition like an eyewitness. He knew every little detail of that great thing. A pontifical and warrior nature, strange in a youth. He was officiating and militant; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of democracy; above the movement of the time, a priest of the ideal.

Enjolras caught glimpses of a luminous uprising under the dark skirts of the future.

In Burgundy and in the cities of the South the tree of Liberty was planted. That is to say, a pole topped by the revolutionary red bonnet.

While a battle still entirely political was preparing in this same place which had already seen so many revolutionary events, while the youth, the secret associations, the schools in the name of principles, and the middle class in the name of interests, were moving in to dash against each other, to grapple and overthrow each other, while each was hurrying and calling the final and decisive hour of the crisis, far off and outside that fatal sector, in the deepest of the unfathomable caverns of that miserable old Paris, the gloomy voice of the people was heard deeply growling. A fearful, sacred voice, composed of the roaring brute and the speech of God, which terrifies the feeble and warns the wise, which comes at the same time from below like the voice of a lion and from above like the voice of thunder. Page 1123 Saint-Denis Chapter 13 part II,The French Revolution, which is nothing more nor less than the ideal armed with the sword, rose abruptly, and by that very movement, closed the door of evil and opened the door of good. It released the question, promulgated truth, drove away miasma, purified the century, crowned the people. We can say it created man a second time, in giving him a second soul, his rights. Page 997 Saint-Denis chapter 7 Argot part III,Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men,There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his breast, his arms hanging, his legs rigid, appeared to await nothing now but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone.

a mother who loses her child can no longer believe in God,Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.

It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awake that slumbering Progress.

Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.

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

No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the exterior also. . . True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.

People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back. They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake.

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

The night was starless and very dark. Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.

Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.

Everyone has noticed the taste which cats have for pausing and lounging between the two leaves of a half-shut door. Who is there who has not said to a cat, “Do come in!” There are men who, when an incident stands half-open before them, have the same tendency to halt in indecision between two resolutions, at the risk of getting crushed through the abrupt closing of the adventure by fate. The over-prudent, cats as they are, and because they are cats, sometimes incur more danger than the audacious.

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

A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.

A miscreant with coiffed, scented hair, a slender waist, the hips of a woman and the chest of a Prussian officer, with a finely tied cravat, by all girls admired. ~ [introduction of character Montparnasse],A miscreant with coiffed, scented hair, a slender waist, the hips of a woman and the chest of a Prussian officer, with a finely tied cravat, by all girls admired. ~ [ introduction of character Montparnasse ],Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.

The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have vanished contains neither thought nor love.

This is what men call genius, just as they call a painted face beauty and a richly attired figure majesty. The confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!,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.

Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars. Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out of a dark background.

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

The earth is a great piece of stupidity.

She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.

She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from teh fact that her little bed was very white.

This 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.

The prosperity of right is that it is always beautiful and pure.

Right is just and true.

What a great thing, to be loved! What a greater thing still, to love! The heart becomes heroic though passion…if no one loved, the sun would go out.

If no one loved, the sun would go out.

Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience? military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honor of Italy? Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization is to be measured. Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in Paris? What is the amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons. Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes! Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass miseries in review, let each one contribute in his pile, you are as rich as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great nation of France! Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves, Misérables.

He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!,The devotion of one man had given strength and courage to all.

He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy who had left upon every field of victory in Europe drops of that same blood which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown grey before his time in discipline and in command, who had lived with his sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade blackened by powder, his forehead wrinkled by the cap, in the barracks, in the camp, in the bivouac, in the ambulance, and who after twenty years had returned from the great wars with his cheek scarred, his face smiling, simple, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done everything for France and nothing against her.

The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.

He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.

There, at a depth to which divers would find it difficult to descend, are caverns, haunts, and dusky mazes, where monstrous creatures multiply and destroy each other. Huge crabs devour fish and are devoured in their turn. Hideous shapes of living things, not created to be seen by human eyes wander in this twilight. Vague forms of antennae, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, and claws, float about there, quivering, growing larger, or decomposing and perishing in the gloom, while horrible swarms of swimming things prowl about seeking their prey. To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.

It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.

I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.

Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care. . . Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small number who at lucky! As for the other men, stagnant night is upon them.

I propose a toast to mirth; be merry! Let us complete our course of law by folly and eating! Indigestion and the digest. let Justinian be the male, and Feasting, the female! Joy the depths! Live, O creation! The world is a great diamond. I am happy. The birds are astonishing. What a festival everywhere! The nightingale is a gratuitous Elleviou. Summer, I salute thee!,Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman. . .

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.

Monsieur, innocence is its own crown. Innocence has no truck with highness. It is as august in rags as it is draped in the fleur-de-lis.

Monsieur, innocence is its own crown! Innocence has only to act to be noble! She is as august in rags as fleur de lys.

It is difficult to frighten those who are easily astonished; ignorance causes fearlessness. Children have so little claim on hell, that if they should see it they would admire it.

. . . where there is no more hope, song remains.

. . . plunged into chance,--that is to say, swallowed up in Providence,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.

The boughs, without becoming detached from the trunk grow away from it.

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.

Formerly these harsh cells in which the discipline of the prison leaves the condemned to himself were composed of four stone walls, a ceiling of stone, a pavement of tiles, a camp bed, a grated air-hole, a double iron door, and were called "dungeons" ; but the dungeon has been thought too horrible; now it is composed ofan iron door, a grated air-hole, a camp bed, a pavement of tiles, a ceiling of stone, four stone walls, and it is called "punishment cell.

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.

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.

Forty is the old age of youth fifty is the youth of old age.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.

As the purse is emptied the heart is filled.

If you would civilize a man begin with his grandmother.

Common sense is in spite of not the result of education.

Sorrow is a fruit. God does not allow it to grow on a branch that is too weak to bear it.

I had rather be hissed for a good verse than applauded for a bad one.

Loving is half of believing.

There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

Genius is a promontory jutting out of the infinite.

Where no plan is laid where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident chaos will soon reign.

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

As the purse is emptied the heart is filled.

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.

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

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

The nearer I approach the end the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous yet simple.

Inspiration and genius - one and the same.

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human race.

What a grand thing to be loved! What a grander thing still to lovel,Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

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

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

Nature like a kind and smiling mother lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.

He who every morning plans the transactions of the day and follows out that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life. . . . If the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident chaos will soon reign.

There are many lovely women but no perfect ones.

Those who always pray are necessary to those who never pray.

Progress - the stride of God!,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.

Proverty and wealth are comparative sins.

Sorrow is a fruit God does not allow it to grow on a branch that is too weak to bear it.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Everything bows to success even grammar.

My tastes are aristocratic my actions democratic.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labour and there is an invisible labour.

Thought is the labour of the intellect reverie is its pleasure.

Toleration is the best religion.

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

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

Those who live are those who fight.

It is God who makes woman beautiful it is the devil who makes her pretty.

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. (Monseigneur Bienvenu in Les Miserables),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. -Claude Frollo,He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.

To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!,If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?,’ she will answer, ‘He is my child.

Paris, viewed from the towers of Notre Dame in the cool dawn of a summer morning, is a delectable and a magnificent sight; and the Paris of that period must have been eminently so.

To breath the air of Paris preserves the soul.

Many people in Paris are quite content to look on at others, and there are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.

To err his human, to stroll is Parisian.

God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.

Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled,In a little town, there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.

[He] had to submit to the fate of every newcomer in a small town, where many tongues talk but few heads think.

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

To love is to act.

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

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

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

People do not lack strength they lack will.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

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.

Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.

Forty is the old age of youth fifty the youth of old age.

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

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

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

Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

Toleration is the best religion.

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

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

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

To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.

A library implies an act of faith.

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

To love beauty is to see light.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

Habit is the nursery of errors.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

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

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

Liberation is not deliverance.

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