Victor Hugo

“They shall exist, and so long as society shall be what it is, they will be what they are. Under the dark vault of their cave, they are forever reproduced in the ooze. What is required to exorcise these goblins? Light. Light in floods. No bat resists the dawn. Illuminate society.”

“two principal problems. First problem: To produce wealth. Second problem: To distribute it.... England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth wonderfully; she distributes it badly.... [she has] a grandeur ill constituted, in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters. Communism think they have solved the second problem. They are mistaken. They destroy production...”

“Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? But where are the snows of years gone by?”

“La tolerancia es la mejor religión”

“mention”

“Let's not bring flame where light is enough.”

“There is a spectacle greater than the sea, and that is the sky; there is a spectacle greater than the sky, and that is the human soul.”

“Indeed, what more could you want? A little garden to amble about in, and infinite space to dream in. At his feet, whatever could be grown and gathered; over his head, whatever could be studied and meditated upon; a few flowers on the ground and all the stars in the sky.”

“One drop of wine is enough to redden a whole glass of water.”

“They adored each other; but still the permanent and the immutable subsist. We may love and laugh, pout, clasp hands, smile, and exchange endearments, but that does not affect eternity. Two lovers hide in the dusk of evening, amid flowers and the twittering of birds, and enchant each other with their hearts shinning in their eyes; but the stars in their course still circle through infinite space.”

“It is the story of society's purchase of a slave. A slave purchased from poverty, hunger, cold, loneliness, defenselessness, destitution. A squalid bargain: human soul for a hunk of bread. Poverty offers and society accepts.”

“In becoming dirt, she has been turned to stone. To touch her is to feel a chill.”

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

“So struggled beneath its anguish this unhappy soul. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom are aggregated all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity, He also, while the olive trees were shivering in the fierce breathe of the Infinite, had long put away from his hand the fearful chalice that appeared before him, dripping with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths.”

“It has been calculated that what with salvos, royal and military politeness, courteous exchanges of uproar, signals of etiquette, formalities of roadsteads and citadels, sunrises and sunsets, saluted every day by all fortresses and all ships of war, openings and closings of ports, etc., the civilized world, discharged all over the earth, in the course of four and twenty hours, one hundred and fifty thousand useless shots. At six francs a shot, that comes to nine hundred thousand francs a day, three hundred millions a year, which vanish in smoke. This is a mere details. All this time the poor were dying of hunger.”

“There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.”

“What is the true story of Fantine? It is the story of society's purchase of a slave. A slave purchased from poverty, hunger, cold, loneliness, defencelessness, destitution. A squalid bargain: a human soul for a hunk of bread. Poverty offers and society accepts.”

“Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved”

“So different are the colours of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.”

“What is now in the past was once in the future”

“novels”

“Man is the second.”

“This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite.”

“To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth”

“à des résultats magnifiques par des voies étroites”

“It was the second white apparition which he had encountered. The Bishop had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette caused the dawn of love to rise.”

“The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted.”

“We are in the hands of those gods, those monsters, those giants: our thoughts.”

“The void in the heart does not accommodate itself to a proxy.”

“where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.”

“Chapter3”

“Cik iespējams maz grēkot - ir cilvēka likums. Pilnīga bezgrēcība ir eņģeļa sapnis.Viss, kas ir no šās zemes, ir pakļauts grēkam. Grēkam ir pievilkšanas spēks.”

“Aie dans les veines le doux lait de ta mère, et le généreux esprit de ton père ; sois bon, sois fort, sois honnête, sois juste ! Et reçois, dans le baiser de ta grand-mère, la bénédiction de ton grand-père.”

“To love or have loved is enough. Don't ask for anything more. There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is an achievement.”

“He had a small but well stocked library. He loved books; books are a remote but reliable friend.”

“For love is like a tree; it grows of itself; it send its roots deep into our being, and often continues to grow green over a heart in ruins.”

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

“The episcopal palace was a huge and beautiful house, built of stone at the beginning of the last century by M. Henri Puget, Doctor of Theology of the Faculty of Paris, Abbe of Simore, who had been Bishop of D—— in 1712. This palace was a genuine seignorial residence. Everything about it had a grand air,—the apartments of the Bishop, the drawing-rooms, the chambers, the principal courtyard, which was very large, with walks encircling it under arcades in the old Florentine fashion, and gardens planted with magnificent trees. In the dining-room, a long and superb gallery which was situated on the ground-floor and opened on the gardens, M. Henri Puget had entertained in state, on July 29, 1714, My Lords Charles Brulart de Genlis, archbishop; Prince”

“Hunchback”

“gallantry”

“When those we love are in question, our prudence invents every sort of madness.”

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

“Peace is happiness digesting”

“The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.”

“One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.”

“Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.”

“Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitude of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light of the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation. And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.”

“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.”

“This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls, --what declaimers!”

“People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.”