“One day of happiness is worth more than a lifetime of sorrow .... Under ordinary circumstances, jealousy is a suspicion to the person who excites it and degrading to the person who indulges it.”

“Do not ask the name of the person who asks you for a bed for a night. He whose name is a burden to him needs shelter more than any one.”

“No one is more avidly curious about other people's doings than those persons whom they do not concern.”

“These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.”

“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.”

“If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?,’ she will answer, ‘He is my child.”

“Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good.”