Victor Hugo

“Joie est mon caractere,C'est la faute a Voltaire;Misere est mon trousseauC'est la faute a Rousseau.[Joy is my character,'Tis the fault of Voltaire;Misery is my trousseau'Tis the fault of Rousseau.]- Gavroche”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cosette, in her seclusion, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire. Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, was slowly bringing these two beings near each other, fully charged and all languishing with the stormy electricities of passion,—these two souls which held love as two clouds hold lightning, and which were to meet and mingle in a glace like clouds in a flash.The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. The rest is only the rest, and comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls give each other in exchanging this spark.At that particular moment when Cosette unconsciously looked with this glance which so affected Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he also had a glance which affected Cosette.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Those who do not weep, do not see.”

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

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

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

“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions”

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

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

“He who despairs is wrong.”

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

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

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

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

“This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”