“A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. There is a person who, departing, took away the sun.”

“It is a shame that I am ignorant, otherwise I would quote to you a mass of things; but I know nothing.”

“He said, moreover, "Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow."It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.”

“Then she looked at Marius, put on a strange expression and said to him, “Do you know, Monsieur Marius, you’re a very pretty boy?”

“All of you, all who are present--consider me worthy of pity, do younot? Good God! When I think of what I was on the point of doing, Iconsider that I am to be envied.”

“Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth.”

“Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.”