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 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.
I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.
If people did not love one another, I really don’t see what use there would be in having any spring.
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.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Life’s great happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
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.
where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?
It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.
The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.
…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.
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.
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.
Le ciel était absolument noir, il n’y avait plus d’étoiles, mais évidemment il en voyait une.
It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
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.
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent
Un sceptique qui adhère à un croyant cela est simple comme la loi des couleurs complémentaires.Ce qui nous manque nous attire.
Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.
Common sense is in spite of, not the result of, education.
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.
As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless
A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict’s suit or a monarch’s crown.
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.
Dream no small dreams. They have no power to stir the hearts of men.
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.
To wipe out abuse is not enough; you have to change people’s whole outlook. The mill is no longer standing, but the wind’s still there, blowing away.
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.
His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one’s own.
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.
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.
Phoebus de Chateaupers likewise came to a ‘tragic end’: he married.
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.
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.
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.
Mother’s arms are made of tenderness, and sweet sleep blesses the child who lies within.
We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.
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.
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.
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.
Though one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one accepts the religion of the temple nearest at hand.
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.
So you’re giving up? That’s it? Okay, okay. We’ll leave you alone, Quasimodo. We just thought, maybe you’re made up of something much stronger.
Good night! Good night!Far flies the light;But still God’s loveShall shine above,Making all bright,Good night! Good night!
Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting them on the table in the guise of candles?
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?
The judge speaks in the name of justice,’ he said. ‘The priest speaks in the name of pity, which is only a higher form of justice.’ (Bishop Myriel)
When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.
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…
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.
The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.
He had the confidence of a man who had never been wounded.
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.
They are les misérables – the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?
She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia gone mad through contact with Hamlet’s madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft.
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.
The sole social evil is darkness; humanity is identity, for all men are made of the same clay.
Isn’t there in every human soul…an initial spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the next, that good can bring out, prime, ignite, set on fire and cause to blaze splendidly, and that evil can never extinguish?
Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth
Tall and thin, Mademoiselle Baptistine was a pale and gentle person. She was the incarnation of the word ‘respectable,’ whereas to be ‘venerable,’ a woman should lso be a mother.
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 shadow of the passions of the moment transversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things.
Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.
France bleeds, but liberty smiles, and before the smile of liberty, France forgets her wound.
When your day has been teeming with different sensations, when you have things on your mind, you can get to sleep to start with but you can’t get back to sleep. Sleep comes a lot more easily than it comes back.
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.
What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?
At the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of Heaven fills those who are quitting the light of Earth.
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.
Police chiefs don’t think a cat can possibly turn into a lion; and yet, it happens.
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.
Enjolras caught glimpses of a luminous uprising under the dark skirts of the future.
Another said , “I don’t ask six months, I don’t ask two. In less than two weeks we’ll meet the government face to face. With twenty-five thousand men we can make our stand.
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.
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.
a mother who loses her child can no longer believe in God
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.
People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back.They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake.
God will reward you,’ he said. ‘You must be an angel since you care for flowers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The prosperity of right is that it is always beautiful and pure.
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.
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.
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.
Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.
Do not inquire he name if him who asks a shelter of you. The very man who’s embarrassed by his name is the one who needs shelter
The terrible shock of his sentence had in some way broken that wall which separates us from the mystery of things beyond and which we call life.
It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.
I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.
I have a dream my life would be. So different from this hell I’m living. So different now from what it seem. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.”*Fantine
Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race.
Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman…
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.
… plunged into chance,–that is to say, swallowed up in Providence
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Those who always pray are necessary to those who never pray.
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.
Sorrow is a fruit God does not allow it to grow on a branch that is too weak to bear it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
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.
A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
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.
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.
Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
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.
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.
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 faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
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.
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
Joy’s smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
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.
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
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.
What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.