The document provides a biography of French author Victor Hugo spanning his life and major works. It details that he was born to a general's family, began writing poetry at a young age, and published his first poems in his late teens. As he matured, Hugo became involved in the literary scene in Paris and produced famous novels and plays that helped launch the Romantic movement in France. He spent nearly 20 years in exile after opposing the French coup of 1851, during which time he wrote some of his most renowned works. Hugo eventually returned to France after the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870.

2. Victor Hugo was born as a son of a General; because his father was permanen
tly away he was bred chiefly by his mother. At the age of 13 he already wro
te first poems and at the age of 17 he founded a critical literary magazine
for which he contributed the most articles. Victor Hugo lost an important
parent person when his mother died in 1821.
Victor Hugo got married at the age of 20 and published his first poem volum
e one year later. With the fantastic novel "Han d'Islande" the public becam
e aware of Hugo for the first time. He was involved in the literary group "
Cénacle" und became their speaker.
Though Victor Hugo grew up in royal surroundings, his next poem "Les Orien
tales" revealed a byroneske sympathy for the Greek patriots and for the re
public.
In 1827 he performed "Marion de Lorme", but the play fall victim to the c
ensorship. Hugo reacted to this failure with "Hernani" - came out in 1830
; in which verses he praised a young outlaw - and produced with it a roma
ntic movement and Hugo became a symbol for the romantic young generation.
Just only 29 years old Victor Hugo wrote his most popular novel "Notre Da
me de Paris - The Hunckback of Notre Dame", which once more moved a socia
l outsider into the hub of the happening. Victor Hugo achieved with this
novel to success and glory.
His later life was influenced by difficult political circumstances and famil
y bad blows (his married daughter drowned in 1843).
When the revolution broke out in 1848, Victor Hugo couldn't decide on for o
ne of both sides. He was a friend of Louis-Philippe and as a representative
of Paris he supported Louis-Napoléon. But with the coup of 1851 he showed
his true color and expressed his displeasure with protests. Victor Hugo had
to flee. He fled to Brussels first and then went on to Jersey.
Victor Hugo stood nearly twenty years in exile, but there - and later in Gu
ernsey - he produced some of his best works, for example the marvelous poem
"Les Châtimes", his colorful "Légende des Siècles" and the novel "Les Misé
rables", in which he narrates of Paris of his youth.
With the last-mentioned he erected a monument to himself in the world of lit

3. erature.
In a famous "Préface" he was busy with the turbulent world of Shakespeare u
nd the spiritualism. In "Les Travailleurs de la Mer", which is set in Guern
sey, and "L'Homme que rit", which is set in England of the 17th century, he
digested his new environment.
His beloved wife died in 1868. A common return to France wasn't possible.
When the republic was proclaimed in 1878 Victor Hugo returned to Paris. In
the same year he suffered a stroke, seven years later he died.
His work was a typical product of the 19th century - full with noble aims an
d of a gigantic dimensions.
---
Extract from his works:
Poems: Odes et ballades (1826), Les Orientales (1829), Les feuilles d'automn
e (1831), Les chants du crépuscule (1835), Les voix intérieures (1837), Les
rayons et les ombres (1840), Les contemplations (1856), Les chansons des rue
s et des bois (1865), L'année terrible (1871), L'art d'être grand-père (1877
), Les quatre vents de l'esprit (1881).
Poetry: Les châtiments (1853) La légende des siècles (1859,1876,1883)
Theater: Cromwell (1827), Hernani (1830), Ruy Blas (1838), Les Burgraves
(1849).
Novels: Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Les misérables (1862), Les travailleurs
de la mer (1866), Quatre-vingt-treize (1874).
---------------------------

4. “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot
remain silent”
“What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in l
ove. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and
the stars through his soul”
“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to b
e silent.”
“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones
; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep i
n peace. God is awake.”
“The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has
come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have f
allen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way
that love begins, and in this way only.”
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved --loved for
ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”

5. “Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attit
ude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark
.”
“People do not lack strength, they lack will.”
“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other
pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”
“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”
“Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.”
“Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it."
She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He th
ought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once
, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly op
ened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said t

6. o him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another wor
ld:--
"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love wi
th you.”
“Imagination is intelligence with an erection.”
“Not being heard is no reason for silence.”
“Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.”
“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back w
ith two.”
“You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live b
y 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 a
re no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; the
y are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.”
“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor a

7. nd there is invisible labor.”
“The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the fainthear
ted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal.”
“If I speak, I am condemned.
If I stay silent, I am damned!”
“An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.”
“He fell to the seat, she by his side. There were no more words. The stars w
ere beginning to shine. How was it that the birds sing, that the snow melts,
that the rose opens, that May blooms, that the dawns whitens behind the bla
ck trees on the shivering summit of the hills?
One kiss, and that was all.
Both trembled, and they looked at each other in the darkness with brilliant ey
es.
They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp ground, no
r the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their hearts were full of tho
ught. They had clasped hands, without knowing it.
She did not ask him; did not even think where and how he had managed to get
into the garden. It seemed so natural to her that he should be there.
From time to time Marius’ knee touched Cosette’s. A touch that thrilled.
At times, Cosette faltered out a word. Her soul trembled on her lips like a d
rop of dew on a flower.
Gradually, they began to talk. Overflow succeeded to silence, which is fulln
ess. The night was serene and glorious above their heads. These two beings,
pure as spirits, told each other everything, their dreams, their frenzies, t

8. heir ecstasies, their chimeras, their despondencies, how they had adored eac
h other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when th
ey had ceased to see each other. They had confided to each other in an intim
acy of the ideal, which already, nothing could have increased, all that was
most hidden and most mysterious in themselves. They told each other, with a
candid faith in their illusions, all that love, youth and the remnant of chi
ldhood that was theirs, brought to mind. These two hearts poured themselves
out to each other, so that at the end of an hour, it was the young man who h
ad the young girl’s soul and the young girl who had the soul of the young ma
n. They interpenetrated, they enchanted, they dazzled each other.
When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she laid
her head on his shoulder, and asked him: "What is your name?"
My name is Marius," he said. "And yours?"
My name is Cosette.”
“Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.”
“Those who do not weep, do not see.”
“Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing
a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces.
If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not
he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
“Before him he saw two roads, both equally straight; but he did see two; and
that terrified him--he who had never in his life known anything but one str
aight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory.”

9. “Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and c
ontinues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the bli
nder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is compl
etely unreasonable.”
“Do you hear the people sing
Lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people
Who are climbing to the light.
For the wretched of the earth
There is a flame that never dies.
Even the darkest night will end
And the sun will rise.”
“You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.”
“...Nobody knows like a woman how to say things that are both sweet and pr
ofound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is Heaven.”
“There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom
.”
“To die for lack of love is horrible. The asphyxia of the soul.”
“Life's great happiness is to be convinced we are loved.”
“What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!”

10. “Let us say in passing, to be blind and to be loved, is in fact--on this eart
h where nothing is complete--one of the most strangely exquisite forms of hap
piness. To have continually at your side a woman, a girl, a sister, a charmin
g being, who is there because you need her, and because she cannot do without
you, to know you are indispensable to someone necessary to you, to be able a
t all times to measure her affection by the degree of the presence that she g
ives you, and to say to yourself: She dedicates all her time to me, because I
possess her whole love; to see the thought if not the face; to be sure of th
e fidelity of one being in a total eclipse of the world; to imagine the rustl
ing of her dress as the rustling of wings; to hear her moving to and fro, goi
ng out, coming in, talking, singing, to think that you are the cause of those
steps, those words, that song; to show your personal attraction at every mom
ent; to feel even more powerful as your infirmity increases; to become in dar
kness, and by reason of darkness, the star around which this angel gravitates
; few joys can equal that. The supreme happiness of life is the conviction th
at we are loved; loved for ourselves--say rather, loved in spite of ourselves
; the conviction the blind have. In their calamity, to be served is to be car
essed. Are they deprived of anything? No. Light is not lost where love enters
. And what a love! A love wholly founded in purity. There is no blindness whe
re there is certainty.”
“Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, fe
els them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.”
“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity
in the higher.”
“Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.”
“Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreami
ng meet.”

11. “What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and es
pecially upon their destinies, as what they do.”
“Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found on
ly in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into thos
e depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last
found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his
hand; and it blinded him to look at it. (pg. 231)”
“Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if
only to avoid them.”
“Love is the only future God offers.”
“I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would f
ind you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me a
nd perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.
“Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure tha
n man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is
a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect great
er than the sky, and it is the human soul.”
“so long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemna
tion which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on eart
h, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; so long as t

12. he three problems of the century - the degradation of man by the exploitation
of his labour, the ruin of women by starvation and the atrophy of childhood
by physical and spiritual night are not solved; so long as, in certain region
s, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words and from a still broader
point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should
be a need for books such as this.”
“Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the
darkness of the mind. ”
“Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.”
“The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dil
ates in misfortune and in the end finds God.”
“Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who
lies therein.”
“...We pray together, we are afraid together, and then we go to sleep. Even i
f Satan came into the house, no one would interfere. After all, what is there
to fear in this house? There is always one with us who is the strongest. Sat
an may visit our house, but the good Lord lives here.”
“Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny
is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes mor
e inexorably than love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; coffin, too
. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all the things Go
d has made, the human heart is the one that sheds most light, and alas! most
night.”

13. “The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment’s silenc
e, "Perhaps more so”
“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”
“...But listen, there will be more joy in heaven over the tears of a repentant
sinner than over the white robes of a hundred just men.”
“Algebra applies to the clouds, the radiance of the star benefits the rose--
no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to
the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do
we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of
sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely grea
t and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and
the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great
is small. All is balanced in necessity; frightening vision for the mind. The
re are marvelous relations between beings and things, in this inexhaustible
whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn, each needs the other. Light does
not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what i
t does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plan
ts. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germin
ation includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's beak brea
king the egg, and it guides the birth of the earthworm, and the advent of So
crates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two ha
s a greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is
an anthill of stars. The same promiscuity, and still more wonderful, between
the things of the intellect and material things. Elements and principles ar
e mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to the point that
the material world, and the moral world are brought into the same light. Phe
nomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic changes
, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling everything up
in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dre
am from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star
there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light, and an element of

14. thought, disseminated and indivisible dissolving all, that geometric point, the self; red
som into God; entangling from the highest to the lowest, all activities in t
he obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, linking the flight of an insect to the
movement of the earth, subordinating--who knows, if only by the identity of
the law--the evolutions of the comet in the firmament to the circling of th
e protozoa in the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, w
hose first motor is the gnat, and whose last is the zodiac.”
“Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not s
peak, 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 ga
zing upon each other.”
“Plea Against the Death Penalty
Look, examine, reflect. You hold capital punishment up as an example. Why?
Because of what it teaches. And just what is it that you wish to teach by m
eans of this example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach that "
thou shalt not kill"? By killing.
I have examined the death penalty under each of its two aspects: as a direc
t action, and as an indirect one. What does it come down to? Nothing but so
mething horrible and useless, nothing but a way of shedding blood that is c
alled a crime when an individual commits it, but is (sadly) called "justice
" when society brings it about. Make no mistake, you lawmakers and judges,
in the eyes of God as in those of conscience, what is a crime when individu
als do it is no less an offense when society commits the deed.”
“If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you
wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.”
“He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends”

15. “...Can human nature be so entirely transformed inside and out? Can man, cre
ated by God, be made wicked by man? Can a soul be so completely changed by i
ts destiny, and turn evil when its fate is evil? Can the heart become distor
ted, contract incurable deformities and incurable infirmities, under the pre
ssure of disproportionate grief, like the spinal column under a low ceiling?
Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incor
ruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by g
oodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never enti
rely extinguish.”
“Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.”
“What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafnes
s, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.”
“if people did not love one another, i really don't see what use there would b
e in having any spring.”
“There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.”
“What happened between those two beings? Nothing. They were adoring one
another.”
“The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his
transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he real
ly had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked
God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable m

16. an, should be so loved by this innocent being”
“It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.”
“The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird
that sustains its cage.”
“Let us sacrifice one day to gain perhaps a whole life.”
“There is a determined though unseen bravery that defends itself foot by foo
t in the darkness against the fatal invasions of necessity and dishonesty. N
oble and mysterious triumphs that no eye sees, and no fame rewards, and no f
lourish of triumph salutes. Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, pover
ty, are battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes great
er than the illustrious heroes.”
“Common sense is in spite of, not the result of, education.”
“Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to mer
it.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped fo
otprints of a duck in the mud.”
“Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to bec
ome an honest man.... Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil,
but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from da
rk thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!”

17. “It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life”
“Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one o
f those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to beho
ld... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround
it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.”
“And do you know Monsieur Marius? I believe I was a little in love with you
.”
“Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragran
ce, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.”
“This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in
the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.”
“There must be a glowing light above such houses. The joy they contain must e
scape in light through the stones of the walls and shine dimly into the darkn
ess. It is impossible that this sacred festival of destiny should not send a
celestial radiation to the infinite. Love is the sublime crucible in which is
consummated the fusion of man and woman; the one being, the triple being, th
e final being-- the human trinity springs from it. This birth of two souls in
to one space must be an emotion for space. The lover is priest; the apprehens
ive maiden submits. Something of this joy goes to God. Where there really is
marriage, that is to say, where there is love, the ideal is mingled with it.
A nuptial bed makes a halo in the darkness. Were it given to the eye of the f
lesh to perceive the fearful and enchanting sights of the superior life, it i
s likely that we should see the forms of night, the winged stranger, the blue
travelers of the invisible, bending, a throng of shadowy heads, over the lum
inous house, pleased, blessing, showing to one another the sweetly startled m

18. aiden bride and wearing the reflection of the human felicity on their divine
countenances. If at that supreme hour, the wedded pair, bewildered with pleas
ure, and believing themselves alone, were to listen, they would hear in their
room a rustling of confused wings. Perfect happiness implies the solidarity
of the angels. That obscure little alcove has for its ceiling the whole heave
ns. When two mouths, made sacred by love, draw near to each other to create,
it is impossible, that above that ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill
in the immense mystery of the stars.”
“I was dying when you came.”
“I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.”
“The soul gropes in search of a soul, and finds it. And that soul, found and
proven, is a woman. A hand sustains you, it is hers; lips lightly touch your
forehead, they are her lips; you hear breathing near you, it is she. To have
her wholly, from her devotion to her pity, never to be left alone, to have th
at sweet shyness as, to lean on that unbending reed, to touch, Providence wit
h your hands and be able to grasp it in your arms; God made palpable, what tr
ansport! The heart, that dark celestial flower, bursts into a mysterious bloo
m. You would not give up that shade for all the light in the world! The angel
soul is there, forever there; if she goes away, it is only to return; she fa
des away in a dream and reappears in reality. You feel an approaching warmth,
she is there. You overflow with serenity, gaiety, and ecstasy; you are radia
nt in your darkness. And the thousand little cares! The trifles that are enor
mous in this void. The most ineffable accents of the womanly voice used to co
mfort you, and replacing for you the vanished universe! You are caressed thro
ugh the soul. You see nothing but you feel yourself adored. It is paradise of
darkness.”
“...mothers are often fondest of the child which has caused them the greatest
pain.”

19. “Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not expe
rienced that. One could even say that the word is never a more magnificent m
ystery than when, within a man, it travels from his thought to his conscienc
e and returns from his conscience to his thought. This is the only sense of
the words, so often used in this chapter, “he said,” “he exclaimed”; we say
to ourselves, we speak to ourselves, we exclaim within ourselves, without br
eaking the external silence. There is great tumult within; everything within
us speaks, except the tongue. The realities of the soul, though not visible
and palpable, are nonetheless realities.”
“One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.
”
“It was SHE. Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meaning contained in t
he three letters of this word ‘she.”
“We must never fear robbers or murderers. They are dangers from outside, sma
ll dangers. It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejustice is the real robber,
vice the real murderer. Why should we be troubled by a threat to our person
or our pocket? What we have to beware of is the threat to our souls'.”
“He who despairs is wrong.”
“One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from retu
rning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the gui
lty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.”
“For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.”

20. “Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.”
“Morality is truth in full bloom.”
“England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakesp
eare,but the Bible made England.”
“Each of our passions, even love, has a stomach that must not be overloaded
. We must in everything write the word 'finis' in time; we must restrain ou
rselves, when it becomes urgent; we must draw the bolt on the appetite, pla
y a fantasia on the violin, then break the strings with our own hand. The W
ise man is he who knows when and how to stop.”
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”
“ý"Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again."What love!" said th
e unhappy girl with a shudder.He resumed,--"The love of a damned soul.”
“Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he sat up, a long stream of blood ro
lled down his face, he raised both arms in air, looked in the direction whenc
e the shot came, and began to sing.”
“The mother...swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while
at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness,
half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood. ”

21. “Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.”
“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”
“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and thr
ow it away. ”
“To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.”
“The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.”
“Faith is necessary to men; woe to him who believes in nothing!”
“The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real.”
“He did not study God; he was dazzled by him.”
“Be a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, stil
l she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.”
“If anything is horrible, if there is a reality that surpasses our worst dreams
, it is this: to live, to see the sun, to be in full possession of manly vigor,
to have health and joy, to laugh heartily, to rush toward a glory that lures y
ou on, to feel lungs that breathe, a heart that beats, a mind that thinks, to s
peak, to hope, to love; to have mother, wife, children, to have sunlight, and s
uddenly, in less time than it takes to cry out, to plunge into an abyss, to fal
l, to roll, to crush, to be crushed, to see the heads of grain, the flowers, th
e leaves, the branches, unable to catch hold of anything, to feel your sword us
eless, men under you, horses over you, to struggle in vain, your bones broken b

22. y some kick in the darkness, to feel a heel gouging your eyes out of their sock
ets, raging at the horseshoe between your teeth, to stifle, to howl, to twist,
to be under all this, and to say, ‘Just then I was a living man!”
“Ah," cried Gavroche, "what does this mean? It rains again! ...If this contin
ues, I withdraw my subscription.”
“where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice?”
“It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-suffi
cient we think it! How, being in possession of the false aim of life, happines
s, we forget the true aim, duty!”
“Love is like a tree: it shoots of itself; it strikes it's roots deeply into ou
r whole being, and frequently continues to put forth green leaves over a heart
in ruins. And there is this unaccountable circumstance attending it, that the b
linder the passion the more tenacious it is. Never is it stronger than when it
is most unreasonable.”
“Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always for
esee is the unforeseen.”
“In fact, were it given to our human eye to see into the consciences of ot
hers, we would judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from
what he thinks. There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream.
Even in the gigantic and the ideal, the dream, which is completely spontan
eous, takes and keeps the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly
and more sincerely from our innermost souls than our unreflected and indef
inite aspirations, much more than in ideas, which are structured, studied,
and compared, can we find the true character of each man. Our chimeras ar
e most like us. Each of us dreams the unknown and the impossible according
to his own nature.”
“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemn
ation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on ear
th, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long a
s the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty, the rui
n of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spir
itual night — are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxi
a shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of v
iew, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot

23. be useless. Preface of Les Miserables”
“A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible,
as a woman without children."
from chapter VIII of Les Miserables”
“...Man lives by affirmation even more than he does by bread.”
“Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.”
“And must I now begin to doubt - who never doubted all these years? My hear
t is stone, and still it trembles. The world I have known is lost in the sh
adows. Is he from heaven or from hell? And does he know, that granting me m
y life today, this man has killed me, even so.
“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is n
ot he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness. ”
“Monsieur' to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea; ig
nominy thirsts for respect.”
“There are things stronger than the strongest man...”
“The malicious have a dark happiness.”
“...It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theate
r. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.
”

24. “To love beauty is to see light.”
“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions”
“The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kin
dness.”
“The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being, and the exten
sion of a single being until it reaches God - that is love.
Love is the salute of the angels to the stars.
How sad is the heart when rendered sad by love!
How great is the void created by the absence of the being who alone fills the
world.”
“The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.”
“The left-handed are precious; they take places which are inconvenient for th
e rest.”
“Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world
but that: to love one another.”
“At least you are mine! Soon – in a few months, perhaps, my angel will slee
p in my arms, will awaken in my arms, will live there. All your thought at
all moments, all your looks will be for me; all my thought, all my moments,

25. all my looks will be for you!
”
“When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.”
“Is there an infinite outside of us? Is this infinite, one, immanent, permanent
; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite, and because, if matter were la
cking in it, it would in that respect be limited; necessarily intelligent, beca
use it is infinite, and since if it lacked intelligence it would be to that ext
ent, finite? Does this finite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we are ab
le to attribute to ourselves the idea of existence only? In other words, it is
not the absolute of which we are the relative? At the same time, while there is
an infinite outside of us, is there not an infinite within us? These two infin
ities, do they not rest superimposed on one another? Does the second infinite n
ot underlie the first, so to speak? It is not the mirror, the reflection, the e
cho of the first, an abyss concentric with another abyss? Is this second infini
te intelligent, also? Does it think? Does it love? Does it will? If the two inf
inities are intelligent, each one of them has a principle of will, and there is
a "me" in the infinite above, as there is a "me" in the infinite below. The "m
e" below is the soul; the "me" above is God.”
“Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! And do
you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He has don
e more--he has given you to me. And after having saved me, and after having
given you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He has sacrificed
himself. Behold the man. And he says to me the ingrate, to me the forgetfu
l, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty one: Thanks! Cosette, my whole life
passed at the feet of this man would be too little. That barricade, that s
ewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all that he traversed for me, for thee,
Cosette! He carried me away through all the deaths which he put aside befo
re me, and accepted for himself. Every courage, every virtue, every heroism
, every sanctity he possesses! Cosette, that man is an angel!”
“To a gargoyle on the ramparts of Notre Dame as Esmeralda rides off with
Gringoire Quasimodo says. "Why was I not made of stone like thee?”

26. “The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically
, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — thi
s orphan, this foundling, this outcast.”
“This is the shade of meaning: the door of a physician should never be close
d; the door of a priest should always be open.”
“He was out there alone with himself, composed, tranquil, adoring, comparing
the serenity of his heart to the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkne
ss by the visible splendors of the constellations and the invisible splendor
of God, opening his soul to the thoughts that fall from the Unknown. In suc
h moments, offering up his heart as the flowers of night emit their perfume,
lit like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding in ecstasy the
midst of creation’s universal radiance, perhaps he could not have told what
was happening in his own mind; he felt something floating away from him, an
d something descending upon him, mysterious exchanges of the soul with the u
niverse.”
“...Human thought has no limit. At its risk and peril, it analyzes and dissect
s its own fascination. We could almost say that, by a sort of splendid reactio
n, it fascinates nature; the mysterious world surrounding us returns what it r
eceives; it is likely that contemplators are contemplated.”
“These are true felicities. No joy beyond these joys. Love is the only ecstas
y, everything else weeps”
“The memory of an absent person shines in the deepest recesses of the heart,
shining the more brightly the more wholly its object has vanished: a light

27. on the horizon of the despairing, darkened spirit; a star gleaming in our in
ward night.”
“To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.”
“Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being the
mselves naturally all happiness and joy. ”
“When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.”
“The owl goes not into the nest of the lark.”
“To pay compliments to the one we love is the first method of caressing, a
demi-audacity venturing. A compliment is something like a kiss through a ve
il.”
“More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”
“Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the mo
ney to make yourself an honest man.'
Valjean, who did not recall having made any promise, was silent. The bish
op had spoken the words slowly and deliberately. He concluded with a sole
mn emphasis:
Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is
good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit
of perdition, and I give it to God.”

28. “The delight we inspire in others has this enchanting peculiarity that, far fr
om being diminished like every other reflection, it returns to us more radiant
than ever.”
“What makes night within us may leave stars.”
“...The first symptom of true love in a man is timidity, in a young woman, b
oldness.”
“Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, b
e sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that
is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery. ”
“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which al
l consistent and logical minds must strive.”
“La vérité est comme le soleil, elle fait tout voir et ne se laisse pas regarder.”
“When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes”
“In this way, his unhappy soul struggled with its anguish. Eighteen hundred
years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom all the san
ctities and all the sufferings of humanity come together, He too, while the
olive trees trembled in the fierce breath of the Infinite, had brushed away

29. the fearful cup that appeared before him, streaming with shadow and running
over with darkness, in the star-filled depths.”
“True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place i
n their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.”
“Be happy without picking flaws.”
“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.”
“There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the
posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
“Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man w
hom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its
entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart
become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under dis
proportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roo
f?”
“Throughout the month of May, every night, in that poor, wild garden, under
that shrubbery, each day, more perfumed and dense, two human beings composed
of every chastity and every innocence, every flowing with all the felicitie
s of Heaven, closer to archangels than men, pure, honest, intoxicated, radia
nt, glowed for each other in the darkness. It seemed to Cosette that Marius
had a crown, and to Marius that Cosette had a halo. They touched, they gazed
at each other, they clasped hands, they pressed close together, but there w
as a distance they did not pass. Not that they respected it; they were ignor
ant of it. Marius felt a barrier, Cosette’s purity, and Cosette felt a suppo
rt, Marius’ loyalty. The first kiss was also the last. Since then, Marius ha

30. d not gone beyond touching Cosette’s hand, or her scarf, or her curls, with
his lips. Cosette was to him a perfume, not a woman. He breathed her. She re
fused nothing, and he asked nothing. Cosette was happy, and Marius was satis
fied. They were living in that ravishing condition that might be called the
dazzling of one soul by another. It was that ineffable first embrace of two
virginities within the ideal. Two swans meeting on the Jung Frau.”
“A people, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the lig
ht returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrecti
on are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival
of the soul.”
“Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' Talk is clouds,
Table Talk is smoke."
Les Miserables”
“Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial,
an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the tr
ue one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something
appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive. The definitive
, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive
permits itself to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffe
r, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies,
forms, appearances! Death will deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you w
ill find them again.”
“Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the idea of duty, are things that, w
hen in error, can turn hideous, but – even though hideous – remain great; the
ir majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, persists in horror. They are vi
rtues with a single vice – error. The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in a
n act of atrocity preserves some mournful radiance that inspires veneration.
Without suspecting it, Javert, in his dreadful happiness, was pitiful, like e
very ignorant man in triumph. Nothing could be more poignant and terrible tha

31. n this face, which revealed what might be called all the evil of good. (pg. 2
91)”
“A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman
who makes the man go off.”
“Ma vie est une énigme dont ton nom est le mot. (My life is an enigma, of
which your name is the word.)”
“Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the s
tarry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs o
f the firmament.”
“But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not maki
ng man and the devil of equal strength.”
“There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and i
t is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstruc
tions.”
“You are adorable, mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and
your soul with the telescope.”
“The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet pe
rmeate it.”

32. “a compliment is like a kiss through a veil.”
“Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they e
nter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on,
it is ominous.”
“Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote.
He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening.
‘The Spirit is a garden,’ said he”
“Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched,
and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of pe
ople who have touched their lives.”
“Look not at the face, young girl, look at the heart. The heart of a handsom
e young
man is often deformed. There are hearts in which love does not keep. Young g
irl, the
pine is not beautiful; it is not beautiful like the poplar, but it keeps its foliage
in
winter.”
“ A doctor’s door should never be closed, a priests door should always be op
en. ”
“This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality tha
t, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a s
hadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two differ
ent phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of t
he despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure

33. in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexande
r; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. T
yranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that b
ears his form.”
“The eye of a man should be still more reverent before the rising of a young
maiden than before the rising of a star. The possibility of touch should in
crease respect. The down of the peach, the dust of the plum, the radiated cr
ystal of snow, the butterfly’s wing powdered with feathers, are gross things
beside that chastity that does not even know it is chaste. The young maiden
is only the glimmer of a dream and is not yet statue. Her alcove is hidden
in the shadows of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of the eye desecrates this
dim penumbra. Here, to gaze, is to profane.”
“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for
ourselves--say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
“The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single be
ing even to God, this is love.”
“Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for th
e first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All th
e elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity
intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out
our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we
have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a
black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stra
nger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us. ”
“The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.”
? Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

34. “A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hu
ndred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over
Napoleon.”
“He had but one consolation, that she had loved him, that her eyes had told
him so, that although she did not know his name she knew his heart, and th
at perhaps, wherever she now was, in whatever undiscoverable place, she lov
ed him still. Perhaps she even thought of him constantly as he did of her.
Sometimes, in those unaccountable moments known to every lover, when the he
art feels a strange stirring of delight although there is not cause for any
thing but grief, he reflected: 'It is her own thoughts that are reaching me
!... And perhaps my thoughts are reaching her!'
Fancies such as these, which an instant later he brushed aside, nevertheless
sufficed to kindle a glow in him which was something near to hope.”
“A library implies an act of faith.”
“Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on
their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do.”
“God knows better than we do what we need.”
“God will reward you,' he said. 'You must be an angel since you care for flo
wers.”
“For the rest, he was the same to all men, the fashionable world and the ord
inary people. He judged nothing in haste, or without taking account of the c

35. irumstances. He said, 'Let me see how the fault arose.”
“He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all h
is happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having
lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again
in detail.”
“He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.”
“There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust
war.”
“An increase of tenderness always ended by boiling over and turning to indig
nation. He was at the point where we seek to adopt a course, and to accept w
hat tears us apart.”
“Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each
of us may benefit.”
“Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the gener
ous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he wh
o is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to vi
rtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes.”
“I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old,
his coat was threadbare - there were holes at his elbows; the water passed
through his shoes and the stars through his soul.”

36. “...The girls chirped and chatted like uncaged warblers. They were deliri
ous with joy... Intoxications of life’s morning! Enchanted years! The win
g of a dragonfly trembles! Oh, reader, whoever you may be, do you have su
ch memories? Have you walked in the underbrush, pushing aside branches fo
r the charming head behind you? Have you slid laughing, down some slope w
et with rain, with the woman you loved?”
“He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her an
ger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.”
“For Marius to arrive at this flourishing condition had required years. Hard
years, and difficult ones; those to get through, these to climb. Marius had
never given up for a single day. He had undergone everything, in the shape
of privation; he had done everything, except get into debt. He gave himself
this credit, that he had never owed a sou to anybody. For him a debt was the
beginning of slavery. He felt even that a creditor is worse than a master;
for a master owns only your person, a creditor owns your dignity and can bel
abour that. Rather than borrow, he did not eat. He had had many days of fast
ing. Feeling that all extremes meet, and that if we do not take care, abasem
ent of fortune may lead to baseness of soul, he watched jealously over his p
ride. Such a habit or such a carriage as, in any other condition, would have
appeared deferential, seemed humiliating and he braced himself against it.
He risked nothing, not wishing to take a backward step. He had a kind of ste
rn blush upon his face. He was timid even to rudeness.
In all his trials he felt encouraged and sometimes even upborne by a secret fo
rce within. The soul helps the body, and at certain moments uplifts it. It is
the only bird which sustains its cage.”
“A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, ret
urning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to veng
eance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him
who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to
an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this
monster existed.

37. “It so happens that this is particular love was precisely the sort best suit
ed to the state of her soul. It was a sort of remote worship, a mute contemp
lation, a deification by an unknown votary. It was the apprehension of adole
scence by adolescence, her dreams becoming romance ad remain in dream, the w
ished-for phantom realized at last and made flash, but still without name or
wrong or fault, or need, or defect; in a word, a lover distant and ideal, a
chimera having form. Any closer and more palpable encounter at this first s
tage would have terrified Cosette, still half buried in the magnifying mirag
e of the cloister. She had all the terrors of children and all the terrors o
f nuns mingled. The spirit of the convent, in which she had been steeped for
five years, was still evaporating from her whole person, and made everythin
g tremulous around her. In this condition, it was not a lover she needed, it
was not even an admirer, it was a vision. She began to adore Marius as some
thing charming, luminous, and impossible.”
“But I have been exposed, I am pursued - by myself! That is a pursuit that do
es not readily let go.”
“I think of winter, which is nothing but a rift in the firmament through whi
ch the winds break loose, the shreds of cloud over the hilltops in the new b
lue of the morning -- and dew-drops, those false pearls, and frost, that bea
uty powder, and mankind in disarray and events out of joint, and so many spo
ts on the sun and so many craters in the moon and so much wretchedness every
where -- when I think of all this I can't help feeling that God is not rich.
He has the appearance of riches, certainly, but I can feel his embarrassmen
t. He gives us a revolution the way a bankrupt merchant gives a ball. We mus
t not judge any god by appearances. I see a shoddy universe beyond that sple
ndour of the sky. Creation itself is bankrupt, and that's why I'm a malconte
nt.”
“Everybody has noticed the way cats stop and loiter in a half-open door. Ha
sn't everyone said to a cat: For heavens sake why don't you come in? With o

38. pportunity half-open in front of them, there are men who have a similar ten
dency to remain undecided between two solutions, at the risk of being crush
ed by fate abruptly closing the opportunity. The overprudent, cats as they
are, and because they are cats, sometimes run more danger than the bold”
“The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me, the me would be it
s limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it i
s. Then it has a me. This me of the infinite is God.”
“I would rather be the head of a fly than the tail of a lion.”
“He therefore turned to mankind only with regret. His cathedral was enough
for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops wh
o at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquilli
ty and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no
hatred for him – he resembled them too closely for that. It was rather the
rest of mankind that they jeered at. The saints were his friends and bless
ed him; the monsters were his friends and kept watch over him. He would som
etimes spend whole hours crouched before one of the statues in solitary con
versation with it. If anyone came upon him then he would run away like a lo
ver surprised during a serenade.”
“You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.
”
“Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.”
“There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back
to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are

39. atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if t
hey do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.”
“Press on! A better fate awaits thee.”
“where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has
the wider vision?”
“We need those who pray constantly to compensate for those who do not pray
at all.”
“Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?”
“Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dang
ers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the re
al murderers. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threaten
s our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.
”
“Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.”
“...Though we chisel away as best we can at the mysterious block from which
our life is made, the black vein of destiny continually reappears.”
“Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a so
rt of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and

40. lyric. ”
“If they had had a different neighbour, one less self-absorbed and more con
cerned for others, a man of normal, charitable instincts, their desperate s
tate would not have gone unnoticed, their distress-signals would have been
heard, and perhaps they would have been rescued by now. Certainly they appe
ared utterly depraved, corrupt, vile and odious; but it is rare for those w
ho have sunk so low not to be degraded in the process, and there comes a po
int, moreover, where the unfortunate and the infamous are grouped together,
merged in a single fateful word. They are les miserables - the outcasts, t
he underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most
need of charity?”
“You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. The gr
eat acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts
of kindness. We pardon to the extent that we love. Love is knowing that ev
en when you are alone, you will never be lonely again. & great happiness of
life is the conviction that we are loved. Loved for ourselves. & even love
d in spite of ourselves.”
“And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the
modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on the morning of some grand f
estival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost--climb upon some e
levated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the
wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the
sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come sc
attered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give
warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!--for it see
ms at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,--behold, r
ising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of har
mony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, s
o to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, l
ittle by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each
other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but
a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belf
ries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyo

41. nd the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.
Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is
, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of
notes which escapes from the belfries. ”
“Demain, dès l'aube, à l'heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m'attends.
J'irai par la forêt, j'irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.
Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.
Je ne regarderai ni l'or du soir qui tombe,
Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,
Et quand j'arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.”
“Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct intere
sts and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. Th
e present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims,
and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The gen
eration which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge i
ts life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shal
l come later on.”
“She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of woo
d.”

42. “The barber in his shop, warmed by a good stove, was shaving a customer and
casting from time to time a look towards this enemy, this frozen and braze
n gamin, who had both hands in his pockets, but his wits evidently out of t
heir sheath.”
“M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a st
ill greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in is
t, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a
royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarch
ist; he was an old-bookist.”
“Love partakes of the soul itself. it is of the same nature. like it, it is a di
vine spark, like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable, it is the p
oint of fire which is within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing c
an limit and nothing can extinguish.”
“Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelle
d, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright
sunshine.”
“Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep int
act your roots”
“The earth is a great piece of stupidity.”
“He who every morning plans the transactions of that day and follows that pla
n carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy
life.”
? Victor Hugo

43. “While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered b
etween his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it
was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.'
No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance
, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he ha
d dined, three days before, for it was now Friday. ”
“She loved with so much passion as she loved with ignorance. She did not kno
w whether it were good or evil, beneficent or dangerous, necessary or accide
ntal, eternal or transitory, permitted or prohibited: she loved.”
“The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribut
e that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What will sp
ring up in a moment? Nobody knows. A burst of laughter starts from a scene
of emotion. In a moment of buffoonery, the serious enters. Impulses depend
on a chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign. A jest suffices to open
the door to the unexpected. They are conferences with sharp turns, where th
e perspective suddenly changes. Chance is the director of these conversatio
ns.”
“Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.”
“The mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling or more dark than in
man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more
mysterious, or more infinite. There is one spectacle grander than the sea,
that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the in
terior of the soul.”
“Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with t
he other.”

44. “His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing
of an art that is not one's own.”
“What was he doing during the trip? What was he thinking about? As he had du
ring the morning, he watched the trees go by, the thatched roofs, the cultiv
ated fields, and the dissolving views of the countryside that change at ever
y turn of the road. Scenes like that are sometimes enough for the soul, and
almost eliminate the need for thought. To see a thousand objects for the fir
st and last time, what could be more profoundly melancholy? Traveling is a c
onstant birth and death. It may be that in the murkiest part of his mind, he
was drawing a comparison between these changing horizons and human existenc
e. All aspects of life are in perpetual flight before us. Darkness and light
alternate: after a flash, an eclipse; we look, we hurry, we stretch out our
hands to seize what is passing; every event is a turn in the road; and sudd
enly we are old. We feel a slight shock, everything is black, we can make ou
t a dark door, the gloomy horse of life that was carrying us stops, and we s
ee a veiled and unknown form that turns him out into the darkness.”
“For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life. There i
s a determined though unseen bravery that defends itself foot by foot in the
darkness agains the fatal invasions of necessity and dishonesty. Noble and
mysterious triumphs that no eye sees and no fame rewards, and no flourish of
triumph salutes. Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are th
e battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater tha
n the illustrious heroes. ”
“His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profoun
d conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered thr
ough to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channel
s hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.”

45. “Certain forms are torn down, and it is well that they should be, but on cond
ition that they are followed by reconstruction.”
“Cosette, in her seclusion, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire. D
estiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, was slowly bringing these two
beings near each other, fully charged and all languishing with the stormy el
ectricities of passion,—these two souls which held love as two clouds hold li
ghtning, 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 c
ome to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fa
llen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way t
hat 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 giv
e each other in exchanging this spark.
At that particular moment when Cosette unconsciously looked with this glan
ce which so affected Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he also had a gl
ance which affected Cosette.”
“And so, being in Heaven, it was easy for him to lose sight of earth.”
“You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great d
eed 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 bothe
r yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life c
lear.”
“Homo homini monstrum”

46. “The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.”
“For with love there is no middle course: it destroys, or else it saves. All
human destiny is contained in that dilemma, the choice between destruction an
d salvation, which is nowhere more implacably posed than in love. Love is lif
e, or it is death. It is the cradle, but also the coffin. One and the same im
pulse moves the human heart to say yes or no. Of all things God has created i
t is the human heart that sheds the brightest light and, alas, the blackest d
espair.”
“Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cose
tte was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.”
“Men become accustomed to poison by degrees”
“Citizens, in the future there will be neither darkness nor thunderbolts; nei
ther ferocious ignorance, nor bloody retaliation. As there will be no more Sa
tan, there will be no more Michael. In the future no one will kill any one el
se, the earth will beam with radiance, the human race will love. The day will
come, citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it w
ill come, and it is in order that it may come that we are about to die.”
“Books are cold but safe friends”
“A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows wha
t it is that's lacking.”

47. “If you are leaving that sorrowful place with hate and anger against men, yo
u are worthy of compassion; if you leave it with good will, gentleness and p
eace, you are better than any of us.”
“Here we stop. On the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, a
finger to his lips.”
“His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty with
in an impenetrable fog.”
“Desiring always to be in mourning, he clothed himself with night.”
“What I feel for you seems less of earth and more of a cloudless heaven.”
“Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Fact
s are one, ideas are the other.”
“A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch
's crown.”
“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
“The soul in the darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkn
ess.”

48. “To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie.”
“Nothing is more dangerous than to stop working. It is a habit that can soon
be lost, one that is easily neglected and hard to resume. A measure of day-
dreaming is a good thing, like a drug prudently used; it allays the sometime
s virulent fever of the over-active mind, like a cool wind blowing through t
he brain to smooth the harshness of untrammelled thought; it bridges here an
d there the gaps, brings things into proportion and blunts the sharper angle
s. But too much submerges and drowns. Woe to the intellectual worker who all
ows himself to lapse wholly from positive thinking into day-dreaming. He thi
nks he can easily change back, and tells himself that it is all one. He is w
rong! Thought is the work of the intellect, reverie is its self-indulgence.
To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse poison with a source of
nourishment.”
“There is, we are aware, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also
a philosophy, classified as pathologic, that denies the sun; this philosophy i
s called blindness.”
“Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.”
“From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty
of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty
”
“The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.”
“The peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the nigh
t, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had.”

49. “C'est une étrange prétention des hommes de vouloir que l'amour conduise q
uelque part”
“Quant au mode de prier, peu importe le nom, pourvu qu'il soit sincère. Tourne
z votre livre à l'envers et soyez à l'infini"
As for how you pray, the words do not matter if they are sincere. Turn your
prayer book upside down and face the infinite.”
“The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance;
it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.”
“Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, a
nd unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.”
“If we wish to be happy, monsieur, we must never comprehend duty; for, as so
on as we comprehend it, it is implacable. One would say that it punishes you
for comprehending it; but no, it rewards you for it; for it puts you into a
hell where you feel God at your side.”
“What is called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, is generall
y fool's gold.”
“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself
or more correctly being loved in spite of yourself.”
“The fact is that the beautiful, humanly speaking, is merely form considered
in its simplest aspect, in its most perfect symmetry, in its most entire harm
ony with our make-up. Thus the ensemble that it offers us is always complete,

50. but restricted like ourselves. What we call the ugly, on the contrary, is a
detail of a great whole which eludes us, and which is in harmony, not with ma
n but with all creation. That is why it constantly presents itself to us in n
ew but incomplete aspects.”
“The book the reader has now before his eyes - from one end to the other, in
its whole and in its details, whatever the omissions, the exceptions, or the
faults - is the march from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from the
false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rotte
nness to life, from brutality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from nothingness
to God. Starting point: matter; goal: the soul. Hydra at the beginning, angel
at the end.”
? Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“Argot is nothing more nor less than a wardrobe in which language, having s
ome bad deed to do, disguises itself. It puts on word-masks and metaphoric
rags.”
“...What pleases us in those who are rising is less pleasing in those who ar
e falling. We do not admire the combat when there is no danger; and in any c
ase, the combatants of the first hour alone have the right to be the extermi
nators in the last. He who has not been a determined accuser during prosperi
ty should hold his peace in adversity. He alone who denounces the success ha
s a right to proclaim the justice of the downfall.”
“In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatre
d will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man w
ill live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, t
he whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.”
“No corruption is possible with the diamond.”
“The first proof of charity in a priest, especially a bishop, is poverty.”

51. “Reality in strong doses frightens.”
“To love or have loved is all-sufficing. We must not ask for more. No other
pearl is to be found in the shadowfolds of life. To love is an accomplishmen
t.”
“La suprema dicha de la vida, es la convicci?n de que se es amado; amado
por s? mismo, digamos mejor, ama¬do a pesar de s? mismo.”
“Does there exist an Infinity outside ourselves? Is that infinity One, immane
nt and permanent, necessarily having substance, since He is infinite and if H
e lacked matter He would be limited, necessarily possessing intelligence sinc
e He is infinite and, lacking intelligence, He would be in that sense finite.
Does this Infinity inspire in us the idea of essense, while to ourselves we
can only attribute the idea of existence? In order words, is He not the whole
of which we are but the part?”
“It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.”
“A fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.”
“Si tout autour de moi, est monotone et décoloré, n'y a-t-il pas en moi une t
empête, une lutte, une tragédie?”
“Bonapartist democrat."
"Grey shades of a quiet mouse colour.”
“He caught her, she fell, he caught her in his arms, he held her tightly unc
onscious of what he was doing. He held her up, though tottering himself. He
felt as if his head were filled with smoke; flashes of light slipped through
his eyelids; his thoughts vanished; it seemed to him that he was performing
a religious act, and that he was committing a profanation. Moreover, he did
not feel one passionate desire for this ravishing woman, whose form he felt
against his heart. He was lost in love.”

52. “That men saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face. That men saw his life,
but the bishop saw his conscience.”
“He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such r
adiant 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 bein
g."
“No fear, no regrets.”
“And, moreover, when it happens that both are sincere and good, nothing will
mix and amalgamate more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. In re
ality, they are the same kind of man. One has devoted himself to country upo
n earth, the other to his country in heaven; there is no other difference.”
“A soul for a piece of bread. Misery makes the offer; society accepts.”
“That's life" said the philosopher each time he was almost laid prostrate, "It
's often our best friends who make us fall”
“At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under
omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more
capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette’s dres
s above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up som
ething from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of he
r breasts. Marius averted his eyes.”
“Relegated as he was to a corner and as though sheltered behind the billiard
table, the soldiers, their eyes fixed upon Enjolras, had not even noticed G
rantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order: 'Take aim!' wh
en suddenly they heard a powerful voice cry out beside them, 'Vive la Republ
ique! Count me in.'

53. Grantaire was on his feet.
The immense glare of the whole combat he had missed and in which he had no
t been, appeared in the flashing eyes of the transfigured drunkard.
He repeated, 'Vive la Republique!' crossed the room firmly, and took his plac
e in front of the muskets beside Enjolras.
'Two at one shot,' he said.
And, turning toward Enjolras gently, he said to him, 'Will you permit it?'
Enjolras shook his hand with a smile.
The smile had not finished before the report was heard.
Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained backed up against the wall is if
the bullets had nailed him there. Except that his head was tilted.
Grantaire, struck down, collapsed at his feet.”
“Loving is almost a substitute for thinking. Love is a burning forgetfulness
of all other things. How shall we ask passion to be logical?”
“Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing
instruction for all and it must answer for the night with it produces. If the
soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he w
ho commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness. (Bishop of D)”
“Sikap hati-hati adalah anak sulung kebijaksanaan.”
“So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damna
tion pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilizatio
n 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 pa
uperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children t
hrough lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in
any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance,
so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les
Misérables cannot fail to be of use.
“There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher- the cle
rgyman”

54. “Le mot tantôt comme un passant mystérieux de l'âme, tantot comme un poly
pe noir de l'océan pensê.”
“His tavern sign bore witness to his feats of arms. He had painted it himself
, being a Jack-of-all-trades who did everything badly.”
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world , and that is a
n idea whose time has come”
“Protect the workers, encourage the rich.”
“He had not yet lived long enough to have discovered that nothing is more c
lose at hand then the impossible, and that what must be looked for is alway
s the unforeseen.”
“Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at
themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love
should lead them somewhere.”
“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.”
“...there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated an
d confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables”
“Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death
will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.”
“Supreme resources spring from extreme resolutions.
Les Miserables, page 674”
“The reflection of a fact is in itself a fact.”

55. “Youth is the future smiling at a stranger, which is itself.”
“Kata-kata keras dan pedas menunjukkan alasan yang lemah.”
“I exist," murmurs someone whose name is Everyone. "I'm young and in love; I
am old and I want rest; I work, I prosper, I do good business, I have house
s to rent, money in State Securities; I am happy, I have wife and children;
I like all these things and I want to go on living, so leave me alone."... T
here are moments when all this casts a deep chill on the large-minded pionee
rs of the human race.”
“The crowd mistrusts the allurement of paladins. The masses, ponderous bodie
s that they are, and fragile on account of their very heaviness, fear advent
ure; and there is adventure in the ideal.”
“Love is an old invention but it is one that is always new. Make the most of i
t.”
“M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, whe
re there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.”
“Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build u
p and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century;
look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belf
ries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its isla
nds, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, wi
th its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's s
kin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of
azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerabl
e chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of da
rkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray
of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of
the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark pictur
e, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, a

56. nd make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-colo
ured sky of evening. Now compare the two.”
“He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that
plan,
carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life.
But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered
merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign”
“Civil war... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as 'foreign
war'? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers? Wars could
only be defined by their aims. There were no 'foreign' or 'civil' wars, on
ly wars that were just or unjust. Until the great universal concord could b
e arrived at, warfare, at least when it was the battle between the urgent f
uture and the dragging past, might be unavoidable. How could such a war be
condemned? War is not shameful, nor the sword-thrust a stab in the back, ex
cept when it serves to kill right and progress, reason, civilization, and t
ruth. When this is war's purpose it maeks no difference whether it is civil
or foreign war - it is a crime. Outside the sacred cause for justice, what
grounds has one kind of war for denigrating another? By what right does th
e sword of Washington despise the pike of Camille Desmoulins? Which is the
greater - Leonidas fighting the foreign enemy or Timoleon slaying the tyran
t who was his brother? One was a defender, the other a liberator. Are we to
condemn every resort to arms that takes place within the citadel, without
concerning ourselves with its aim? ”
“Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is a
bout to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not
allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes
murder.”
? Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are as
sociated and confounded in a single word, Les Miserables; whose fault is it?
And then, is it not when the fall is lowest that charity ought to be greatest
?”

57. “If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?,’ she will answer, ‘He is my c
hild.”
“Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon
their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.”
“There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. The dream, which
is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ide
al, the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely f
rom the very bottom of our souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirat
ions towards the splendours of destiny. ”
“Il y a des gens qui paieraient pour se vendre”
“It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceive
d by its false resemblances to merit. To the crowd, success wears almost the
features of true mastery, and the greatest dupe of this counterfeit talent is
History.”
“Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk
and the will that moves.”
“See Monsieur Geborand, buying a pennyworth of paradise.”
“According to an eastern fable, the rose was white when God created it, but
when, as it unfolded, it felt Adam's eyes upon it, it blushed in modesty and
turned pink.”
“Voyager, c'est naître et mourir à chaque instant.”
“Let us be like a bird for a moment perched
On a frail branch when he sings;

58. Though he feels it bend, yet he sings his song,
Knowing that he has wings.”
“The conflict between right and fact has endured since the origins of society.
To bring the duel to an end, to consolidate the pure ideal with the human rea
lity, to make the right peacefully interpenetrate the fact, and the fact the r
ight, this is the work of the wise.”
“For prying into any human affairs, none are equal to those whom it does no
t concern.”
“He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.
Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.
Nothing is more sublime.”
“It's that big guy who's the government.”
“...and if you fall as Lucifer fell, you fall in flames! And so it must be, for
so it is written on the doorway to Paradise, that those who falter and those w
ho fall must pay the price!”
“by making himself a priest made himself a demon.”
“. . . winter always carries with it something of our sadness; then April cam
e, that daybreak of summer, fresh like every dawn, gay like every childhood;
weeping a little sometimes like the infant that it is. Nature in this month h
as charming gleams which pass from the sky, the clouds, the trees, the fields
, and the flowers, into the heart of man.”
“Happiness wishes everybody happy.”
“You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience. . . .
You ask why I speak? I am neither informed against, nor pursued, nor hunte

59. d, say you. Yes! I am informed against! yes! I am pursued! yes! I am hunte
d! By whom? by myself. It is I myself who bar the way before myself, and I
drag myself, and I urge myself, and I check myself and I exert myself, an
d when one holds himself he is well held.”
“Il possédait comme tout le monde sa terminaison en "iste", sans laquelle perso
nne n'aurait pu vivre en ce temps-là, mais il n'était ni royaliste, ni bonapart
iste, ni chartiste, ni orléaniste, ni anarchiste; il était bouquiniste.”
“The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times
almost insupportable.”
“Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a r
eturn from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.”
“The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will g
low with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own do
ctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Libe
rty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limb
s that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged w
ith anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows:
sublime and yet so simple.”
“But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must pu
nish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and pun
ishment from God.”
“So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, a
n hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything withou
t agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather

60. to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult
. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be
so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound
weight.”
“Suffering engenders passion; and while the prosperous blind themselves, or g
o to sleep, the hatred of the unfortunate classes kindles its torch at some s
ullen or ill-constituted mind, which is dreaming in a corner, and sets to wor
k to examine society. The examination of hatred is a terrible thing.”
“Let us never weary of repeating, that to think first of the disinherited and
sorrowful classes; to relieve, ventilate, enlighten, and love them; to enlar
ge their horizon to a magnificent extent; to lavish upon them education in ev
ery 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 universa
l aim; to limit poverty without limiting wealth; to create vast fields of pub
lic 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 aptit
ude, and laboratories for every intellect; to increase wages, diminish toil,
and balance the debit and credit--that is to say, proportion enjoyment to eff
ort, and supply to demand; in a word, to evolve from the social machine, on b
ehalf of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more com
fort, is (and sympathetic souls must not forget it) the first of brotherly ob
ligations, and (let egotistic hearts learn the fact) the first of political n
ecessities.”
Let us reflect, if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties t
he mind in a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen.
The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; lov
ed for one's own sake -- let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self.

61. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real mur
derers. The great dangers lie within ourselves.”
Night and the day, when united,
Bring forth the beautiful light.”
“Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.”
“Memories are our strength. When night attempts to return, we must light up
the great dates, as we would light torches.”
“The first symptom of love in a young man is shyness; the first symptom in
a woman, it's boldness.”
There is, we are aware, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also
a philosophy, classified as pathologic, that denies the sun; this philosophy
is called blindness. To set up a theory that lacks a source of truth is an ex
cellent 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, b
y this philosophy that has to grope its way. It makes one think of a mole exc
laiming, "How I pity them with their sun!" There are, we know, illustrious an
d powerful atheists; with them, the matter is nothing but a question of defin
itions, 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, thos
e seats of error but innocence, of mistaken views but good intentions, of ig
norance but devotion, of torment but martyrdom, we must nearly always say ye
s or no...The monastery is a renunciation. Self-sacrifice, even when misdire

62. cted, is still self-sacrifice. To assume as duty a strict error has its pecu
liar grandeur.
“History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nat
ure than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is real
ity. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal m
an beneath momentary man.”
“One becomes gradually accustomed to poison.”
“To have lied is to have suffered.”
“Her soul trembled on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.”
“As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, fr
om which he recovered only slowly.”
“Could the word ‘iron’ be the root from which ‘irony’ is derived?”
“Oh! Everything I loved!”
“Are you afraid of the good you might do?”
“I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets an
d frighten the horses.”

63. “The right, indeed, is indestructible. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Ven
ice can be Teutonic. Kings waste their energies in that contention, and lose
their honour. Sooner or later the submerged nation rises again to the surfa
ce; Greece is still Greece and Italy, Italy... The theft of a people can nev
er be justified. These august swindles have no future. A nation cannot be sh
aped as though it were a pocket handkerchief.”
“People do not read stupidities with impunity.”
“Thought must always contain an element of desire, but there is none in dre
aming. The dream, which is wholly spontaneous, adopts and preserves, even i
n our utmost flights of fancy, the pattern of our spirit; nothing comes mor
e truly from the very depths of the soul than those unconsidered and uncont
rolled aspirations to the splendours of destiny. It is in these, much more
than in our reasoned thoughts, that a man's true nature is to be found. Our
imaginings are what most resemble us. Each of us dreams of the unknown and
the impossible in his own way.”
“An army is a strange contrivance in which power is the sum of a vast total
of impotence.”
“The soul falls into contemplation before this sanctuary, where the celebratio
n of love is held.”
“Desgraciado quien no haya amado mas que cuerpos, formas y apariencias. La
muerte le arrebatara todo. Procurad amar las almas y un dia las volvereis
a encontrar.”
“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spec
tacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”

64. “My greatness does not extend to this shelf.”
“He who has seen the misery of man only has seen nothing, he must see the
misery of woman; he who has seen the misery of woman only has seen nothi
ng, he must see the misery of childhood.”
“Well, listen a moment, Monsieur Mayor; I have often been severe in my life
towards others. It was just. I did right. Now if I were not severe towards
myself, all I have justly done would become injustice. Should I spare myse
lf more than others? No. What! if I should be prompt only to punish others
and not myself, I should be a wretched indeed! - Javert to M. Madeleine”
“He endeavored to collect his thoughts, but did not succeed. At those hours e
specially when we have sorest need of grasping the sharp realities of life do
the threads of though snap off in the brain.”
thénardier 2 people liked it like
“We may be indifferent to the death penalty and not declare ourselves eithe
r way so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when
we do, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to choose sides, for or a
gainst... Death belongs to God alone.”
“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over,
this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it
has advanced.”
“Love is a fault; so be it.”
“Fate, with its mysterious and inexorable patience, was slowly bringing toget