Victor Hugo, Les Misérables Quotes
The best minds have their soft spots and sometimes feel somewhat bruised by the scant respect of logic.
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.
Mother's arms are made of tenderness, and sweet sleep blesses the child who lies within.
We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.
The sins of women and children, domestic servants and the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the sins of the husbands and fathers, the masters, the strong and the rich and the educated.
Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are done, we recognize one thing: that the human race has been badly manhandled, but that it has moved forward.
Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting them on the table in the guise of candles?
Death belongs only to God. What right have men to lay hands on a thing so unknown?
The judge speaks in the name of justice, ' he said. 'The priest speaks in the name of pity, which is only a higher form of justice.' (Bishop Myriel)
When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.
This is the shade of difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of the priest should always be open.
What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant...
Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how much better everything would go!
As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.
Monsieur Bienvenu was simply a man who accepted these mysterious questions...and who had in his soul a deep respect for the mystery which enveloped them.
They are les misérables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?
She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia gone mad through contact with Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft.
He had to accept the fate of every newcomer to a small town where there are plenty of tongues that gossip and few minds that think.
Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.
True or false, that which is set of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.
. . . for men felt therein the presence of that great human thing which is called law, and that great divine thing which is called justice.
Because things are not agreeable, " said Jean Valjean, "that is no reason for being unjust towards God.
Sin as little as possible-that is the law of mankind. Not to sin at all is the dream of the angel. All earthly things are subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.
Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.
What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion.
The shadow of the passions of the moment transversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things.
France bleeds, but liberty smiles, and before the smile of liberty, France forgets her wound.
Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material amelioration...If three is anything more poignant than a body agonizing for want of bread, it is a soul dying of hunger for light.
Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.
He was fond of saying, "There is a bravery of the priest as well as the bravery of a colonel of dragoons, --only, " he added, "ours must be tranquil.
What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?
At the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of Heaven fills those who are quitting the light of Earth.
Enjolras caught glimpses of a luminous uprising under the dark skirts of the future.
Another said, "I don't ask six months, I don't ask two. In less than two weeks we'll meet the government face to face. With twenty-five thousand men we can make our stand.
In Burgundy and in the cities of the South the tree of Liberty was planted. That is to say, a pole topped by the revolutionary red bonnet.
There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.
It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.
It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awake that slumbering Progress.
People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back.They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake.
The night was starless and very dark. Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.
Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.