Les Miserables

Never am I seen with coats bedizened with gold and gems; I leave this false splendour to badly organized minds.

It is nothing to die; it is horrible not to live.

The soul does not give itself up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.

The night was starless and very dark. Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.

Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

The forests through which we have passed with our child, the trees under which we have walked, the convents in which we have hidden, the games, the free laughter of childhood, all is in shadow. I imagined that all that belonged to me. There was my folly. Those Thenardiers were wicked. We must forgive them. Cosette, the time has come to tell of your mother. Her name was Fantine. Remember that name: Fantine. Fall on your knees whenever you pronounce it. She suffered much. And loved you much. Her measure of unhappiness was as full as yours of happiness. Such are the distributions of God. He is on high, he sees us all, and he knows what he does in the midst of his great stars. So I am going away, my children. Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.

This stone is entirely blank. The only thought in cutting it was of the essentials of the grave, and there was no other care than to make this stone long enough and narrow enough to cover a man.

No name can be read there.

Alas! to have risen does not prevent falling. We see this in history oftener than we would wish.

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Marius had lived too little as yet to know that nothing is more imminent than the impossible, and that what we must always forsee is the unforseen.

The pupil dilates in the night, and at last finds day in it, even as the soul dilates in misfortune, and at last finds God in it.

Philosophy is the microscope of thought.

This book, Les Misérables, is no less your mirror than ours. Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book, — I understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use. As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.

We take the cart for the republic and we leave the Auvergnat to the monarchy.

Death is a good arrangement. God knows better than we do what we need. That you are happy, that Monsieur Pontmercy has Cosette, that youth espouses morning, that there are about you, my children, lilacs and nightingales, that your life is a beautiful lawn in the sunshine, that all the enchantments of heaven fill your souls, and now, that I who am good for nothing, that I die; surely all this is well. Look you, be reasonable, there is nothing else possible now, I am sure that it is all over.

A people, like a star, has the right of eclipse. And all is well, provided the light return and the eclipse does not degenerate into night. Dawn and resurrection are synonyms. The reappearance of the light is identical with the persistence of the Me.

Let the one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and let them both imagine that they are fighting for the country; the strife will be colossal...

You talk genteelly. Really, nobody would guess your age. You ought to sell all your hairs at a hundred francs apiece. That would make you five hundred francs.

You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Misérables is written for all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems surpass frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: "Open to me, I come for you."

To form an idea of this struggle, imagine fire applied to a mass of terrible valour, and that you are witnessing the conflagration. It was not a combat, it was the interior of a furnace; there mouths breathed flame; there faces were wonderful. There the human form seemed impossible, the combatants flashed flames, and it was terrible to see going and coming in that lurid smoke these salamanders of the fray. The successive and simultaneous scenes of this grand slaughter, we decline to paint.

When a man clad by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order to make of him also a man clad by the state. Only the colour is the whole question. To be clad in blue is glorious; to be clad in red is disagreeable.

You are a wretch! you are a liar, a slanderer, a scoundrel. You came to accuse this man, you have justified him; you wanted to destroy him, you have succeeded only in glorifying him. And it is you who are a robber! and it is you who are an assassin! I saw you Thenardier, Jondrette, in that den on the Boulevard de l'Hopital. I know enough about you to send you to the galleys, and further even, if I wished.

The assailants had the numbers; the insurgents the position. They were on the top of a wall, and they shot down the soldiers at the muzzles of their muskets, as they stumbled over the dead and wounded and became entangled in the escarpment. This barricade, built as it was, and admirably supported, was really one of those positions in which a handful of men hold a legion in check.

Cosette, do you hear? that is the way with him! he begs my pardon, and do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? he has saved my life. He has done more. He has given you to me. And, after having saved me, and after having given you to me, Cosette, what did he do with himself? he sacrificed himself. There is the man. And, to me the ungrateful, to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty, he says: Thanks! Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet of this man would be too little. That barricade, that sewer, that furnace, that cloaca, he went through everything for me, for you, Cosette! He bore me through death in every form which he put aside from me, and which he accepted for himself. All courage, all virtue, all heroism, all sanctity, he has it all, Cosette, that man is an angel!"Hush! hush!" said Jean Valjean in a whisper. "Why tell all that?""Why have not you told it? It is your fault, too. You save people's lives, and you hide it from them! You do more, under pretence of unmasking yourself, you calumniate, yourself. It is frightful... The truth is the whole truth; and you did not tell it. You were Monsieur Madeleine, why not have said so? You had saved Javert, why not have said so? I owe my life to you! why not have said so?"

Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle of Hell to another.

They are willing to die, provided they kill.

There are people who observe the rules of honour as we observe the stars, from afar off.

Oh, yes, forbid me to die. Who knows? I shall obey perhaps. I was just dying when you came. That stopped me, it seemed to me that I was born again.

At certain hours, everything seems impossible; at other hours, everything appears easy; Jean Valjean was in one of those happy hours.

To save yourself by means of that which has ruined you is the masterpiece of great men.

He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange,

He lived. He died when he had no longer his angel.

The thing came to pass simply,

Of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.

Your friends have just shot you.

There was assault after assault. The horror continued to increase.

In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: "Help me!"

I was writing just now to Cosette. She will find my letter. To her I bequeath the two candlesticks which are on the mantel. They are silver; but to me they are gold, they are diamond; they change the candles which are put into them, into consecrated tapers. I do not know whether he who gave them to me is satisfied with me in heaven. I have done what I could.

What you fellows call progress moves by two springs, men and events. But sad to say, from time to time the exceptional is necessary. For events as well as for men, the stock company is not enough; geniuses are needed among men, and revolutions among events. Great accidents are the law; the order of things cannot get along without them; and, to see the apparitions of comets, one would be tempted to believe that Heaven itself is in need of star actors. At the moment you least expect it, God placards a meteor on the wall of the firmament. Some strange star comes along, underlined by an enormous tail. And that makes Caesar die. Brutus strikes him with a knife, and God with a comet.

Babet was thin and shrewd. He was transparent, but impenetrable. You could see the light through his bones, but nothing through his eye.

His brothers in the evening, his father in the morning; such had been his night.

When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?

We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.

The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl it is boldness.

He had finally come hardly to look at nothing but the sky, the only thing that truth can see from the bottom of her well.

Poor mothers, he thought. There is one thing sadder than to see their children die — to see them lead evil lives.

He went to mass rather from good-feeling than from devotion, and because he loved the faces of men, but hated their noise and he found them, at church only, gathered together and silent.

"The bureau is closed," said Gavroche. "I receive no more complaints."

It is a pity that I am ignorant, for I would quote you a crowd of things, but I don't know anything.

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

The wind of revolutions is not tractable.

In '93, a coppersmith bought the house to pull it down, but not being able to pay the price for it, the nation sent him into bankruptcy. So that it was the house that pulled down the coppersmith.

Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.

His creditors had sought for him, also, with less love than Marius but with as much zeal, and had not been able to put their hands on him.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

Thoughtful persons seldom speak of happiness or unhappiness. In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.

A clock does not stop at the very moment you lose the key.

He took good care not to be useless; having books did not prevent him from reading, being a botanist did not prevent him from being a gardener.

The room thus lighted up seemed rather a smithy than the mouth of hell; but Jondrette, in that glare, had rather the appearance of a demon than of a blacksmith.

The barber in his shop, warmed by a good stove, was shaving a customer and casting from time to time a look towards this enemy, this frozen and brazen gamin, who had both hands in his pockets, but his wits evidently out of their sheath.

There are moments when a man has a furnace in his brain. Marius was in one of those moments.

"You are pitiable, but my life is not worth the trouble of so long a defence. As to your imagining that you could make me speak, that you could make me write what I do not wish to write, that you could make me say what I do not wish to say —"

He pulled up the sleeve of his left arm, and added:

"Here."

At the same time he extended his arm, and laid upon the naked flesh the glowing chisel, which he held in his right hand, by the wooden handle.

They heard the hissing of the burning flesh; the odour peculiar to chambers of torture spread through the den. Marius staggered, lost in horror; the brigands themselves felt a shudder; the face of the wonderful old man hardly contracted, and while the red iron was sinking into the smoking, impassable, and almost august wound, he turned upon Thenardier his fine face, in which there was no hatred, and in which suffering was swallowed up in a serene majesty.

The endeavor is vain, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

Dante would have thought he saw the seven circles of Hell on their passage.

Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

That will be swallowing a language very rapidly or a hundred-sous piece very slowly.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.

Let us lament as over stomachs, over minds which do not eat. If there is anything more poignant than a body agonising for want of bread, it is a soul which is dying of hunger for light.

There is but one way of refusing To-morrow, that is to die.

I have just met Marius' new hat and coat, with Marius inside. Probably he was going to an examination. He looked stupid enough.

Civil war? What does this mean? Is there any foreign war? Is not every war between men, war between brothers? War is modified only by its aim. There is neither foreign war, nor civil war; there is only unjust war and just war.

He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.

No. I am the devil, but that is all the same to me.

The road is free; the streets belong to everybody.

"Bossuet!" Courfeyrac exclaimed. "Eagle of Meaux! you are a prodigious fool. Follow a man who is following a man!"

This old man, so firm and so brave before so great a peril, seemed to be one of those natures who are courageous as they are good, simply and naturally. The father of a woman that we love is never a stranger to us. Marius felt proud of this unknown man.

Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

Logic ignores the Almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.

Finally, he had never succeeded in loving any woman as much as a tulip bulb, or any man as much as an Elzevir.

His life had been darkness, his end was night.

His specialty was to succeed in nothing... He was poor, but his fund of good humor was inexhaustible. He soon reached the last sou but never the last burst of laughter. When met by adversity, he saluted that acquaintance cordially, he patted catastrophes on the back; he was so familiar with fatality as to call it by its nick-name.

The prisoner was no longer fastened to the bed save by one leg.

Before the seven men had had time to recover themselves and spring upon him, he had bent over to the fireplace, reached his hand towards the furnace, then rose up, and now Thenardier, the Thenardiess, and the bandits, thrown by the shock into the back part of the room, beheld him with stupefaction, holding above his head the glowing chisel, from which fell an ominous light, almost free and in a formidable attitude.

"Ah," cried Gavroche, "what does this mean? It rains again! Good God, if this continues, I withdraw my subscription."

"Pardon me, monsieur," answered M. Leblanc, with a tone of politeness which, at such a moment, had a peculiarly strange and powerful effect, "I see that you are a bandit."

You speak now like a brave man and an honest man. Courage does not fear crime, and honesty does not fear authority.

When Jondrette had said: My name is Thenardier , Marius had trembled in every limb, and supported himself against the wall as if he had felt the chill of a sword-blade through his heart.

The most terrible of motives and the most unanswerable of responses: Because.

Desiring always to be in mourning, he clothed himself with night.

A fire would cause a dawn, undoubtedly, but why not wait for the break of day?

At a certain depth of distress, the poor, in their stupor, groan no longer over evil, and are no longer thankful for good.

One evening little Gavroche had had no dinner; he remembered that he had had no dinner also the day before; this was becoming tiresome. He resolved that he would try for some supper.

Those are rare who fall without becoming degraded; there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, a fatal word, Les Misérables.

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

What can be done in a sepulcher, they agonised, and what can be done in a hell, they sang. For where there is no more hope, song remains.

Would you realize what Revolution is, call it Progress; and would you realize what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.

Laughter is sunshine; it chases winter from the human face.

When he was tried, God was not there.

A thief is admitted, provided he be a lord.

It is necessary to understand them, were it only to avoid them.

In two days the colonel had been buried, and in three days forgotten.

Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.

Upon the first goblet he read this inscription, monkey wine; upon the second, lion wine; upon the third, sheep wine; upon the fourth, swine wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, that which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which stupefies; finally the last, that which brutalizes.

Not being heard is no reason for silence.

A sign of assent being given, with one blow of a hammer he broke the chain riveted to the iron ring at his ankle, then took a rope in his hand, and flung himself into the shrouds. Nobody, at the moment, noticed with what ease the chain was broken. It was only some time afterwards that anybody remembered it.

Sought for, he might be, but followed he was not.

In our eyes, cenobites are not idlers, nor is the recluse a sluggard.

Monsieur procurer du roi, am I allowed to wear my scar?

He was full of regret and remorse, and he thought with despair that all he had in his soul he could say now only to a tomb.

Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he might be said to carry two knapsacks; in one he had the thoughts of a saint, in the other the formidable talents of a convict. He helped himself from one or the other as occasion required.

She drowned what little brain she had in them.

Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

They belonged to that bastard class formed of low people who has risen, and intelligent people who have fallen, which lies between the classes called middle and lower, and which unites some of the faults of the latter with nearly all the vices of the former, without possessing the generous impulses of the workman, or the respectability of the bourgeois.

We are of those who believe in the pitifulness of orisons, and in the sublimity of prayer.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil.

We bow to the man who kneels.

We are for religion against the religions.

Violets are blue. Roses are red.

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.

My father... was a humble and heroic man, who served the republic and France gloriously, who was great in the greatest history that men have made, who lived a quarter of a century in the camp, by day under grape and under balls, by night in the snow, in the mud, and in the rain, who captured colours, who received twenty wounds, who died forgotten and abandoned, and who had but one fault; that was in loving too dearly two ingrates, his country and me.

Happily, God knows where to find her soul.

Marius saw in Bonaparte the flashing spectre which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard the future. Despot, but dictator; despot resulting from a republic and summing up a revolution. Napoleon became to him the people-man as Jesus is the God-man.We see, like all new converts to a religion, his conversion intoxicated him, he plunged headlong into adhesion, and he went too far. His nature was such; once upon a descent it was almost impossible for him to hold back. Fanaticism for the sword took possession of him, and became complicated in his mind with enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that along with genius, and indiscriminately, he was admiring force, that is to say that he was installing in the two compartments of his idolatry, on one side what is divine, and on the other what is brutal. In several respects he began to deceive himself in other matters. He admitted everything. There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth. He had a sort of willful implicit faith which swallowed everything in mass. On the new path upon which he had entered, in judging the crimes of the ancient regime as well as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected the attenuating circumstances.

He did not seem to know that there was on the earth a being called woman.

This brother... felt obliged to give alms to the poor whom he met, but never gave them anything more than coppers or worn-out sous, finding thus the means of going to Hell by the road to Paradise.

To mingle with one's life a certain presence of the sepulchre is the law of the wise man, and it is the law of the ascetic. In this relation, the ascetic and the sage tend towards a common centre.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.

Not seeing people permits us to imagine in them every perfection.

Those who pray always are necessary to those who never pray. In our view, the whole question is in the amount of thought that is mingled with prayer. Leibnitz, praying, is something grand; Voltaire, worshipping, is something beautiful. Deo erexit Voltaire.

You must be very sharp to tell me where I was born. I don't know myself. Everybody can't have houses to be born in; that would be too handy.

We blame the Church when it is saturated with intrigues; we despise the spiritual when it is harshly austere to the temporal; but we honour everywhere the thoughtful man.

"Impossible," he said. "Father Fauchelevent, let it go that I fell from on high."

She would have softened a heart of granite; but you cannot soften a heart of wood.

I do not know whether it is that I no longer understand French, or you no longer speak it; but the fact is I do not understand you.

A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labour and there is an invisible labour.

Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.

He who is escaping never coughs and never sneezes.

It is a mistake to imagine that man can exhaust his destiny, or can reach the bottom of anything whatever. Alas! what are all these destinies thus driven pell-mell? whither go they? why are they so? He who knows that, sees all the shadow. He is alone. His name is God.

Unreflecting, headlong minds say: "Of what use are those motionless figures by the side of mystery? What purpose do they serve? What do they effect?"Alas! in the presence of that obscurity which surrounds us and awaits us, not knowing what the vast dispersion of all things will do with us, we answer: There is, perhaps, no work more sublime than that which is accomplished by these souls; and we add, There is no labour, perhaps, more useful.

That recruit was at home, hunting up his "card," and rather unlikely he was to find it, as it was in Fauchelevent's pocket.

Without at all invalidating what we have just said, we believe that a perpetual remembrance of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.

Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers.

One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. In the case of the sailor, this is called a tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse.

Years place at last a venerable crown upon a head.

A faith is a necessity to man. Woe to him who believes nothing.

He caught glimpses of everything, but saw nothing.

Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.

This lowly sand which you trample beneath your feet, if you cast it into the furnace, and let it melt and seethe, shall become resplendent crystal, and by means of such as it a Galileo and a Newton shall discover stars.

The mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling nor more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.

To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man, were it only of the most infamous of men, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and final epic. The conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts and of temptations, the furnace of dreams, the cave of the ideas which are our shame; it is the pandemonium of sophisms, the battlefield of the passions. At certain hours, penetrate within the livid face of a human being who reflects, and look at what lies behind; look into that soul, look into that obscurity. There, beneath the external silence, there are combats of giants as in Homer, melees of dragons and hydras, and clouds of phantoms as in Milton, ghostly labyrinths as in Dante. What a gloom enwraps that infinite which each man bears within himself, and by which he measures in despair the desires of his will, and the actions of his life!

To be wicked does not insure prosperity — for the inn did not succeed well.

A good mayor is a good thing. Are you afraid of the good you can do?

Both had wings, one like angel, the other like a goose.

There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.

To think of the Gloom is a serious thing.

Truly at that instant, if Jean Valjean had had a kingdom, he would have given it for a rope.

We do not comprehend everything, but we insult nothing.

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

He went nowhere save on condition of ruling there.

Napoleon... mighty somnambulist of a vanished dream.

Jean Valjean entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering: he went out hardened; he entered in despair: he went out sullen. What had happened within this soul?

To be a saint is the exception, but to be just is the rule. Make mistakes, commit failures, sin if you will, but be just.

There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think.

As you see, he had a strange way of his own to judge things. I suspect he had gotten it from the Gospel.

Sire, said M. Myriel, you behold a good man, and I a great man. May each of us profit by it.

The night was not very dark; there was a full moon, across which large clouds were driving before the wind. This produced alternations of light and shade, out-of-doors eclipses and illuminations, and in-doors a kind of twilight. This twilight, enough to enable him to find his way, changing with the passing clouds, resembled that sort of livid light which falls through the window of a dungeon before which men are passing.

Did a voice whisper in his ear that he had just passed through the decisive hour of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him, that if, thereafter, he should not be the best of men, he would be the worst.

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.

Born in Provence, he [Bishop Myriel] easily became familiar with all the [Occitan] dialects of the South. [...] People loved this, and it had helped him greatly to get close to all kinds of temperaments. Whether he was in a cottage or up in a mountain, he would feel at home. He knew how to speak of the highest things using the lowliest vulgar expressions. By speaking every tongue, he entered every soul.

The beginning as well as then end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law; that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague, brutal desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.

Table talk and lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; lovers' talk is clouds, table talk is smoke.

He set himself stubbornly in opposition to the angelic deeds and the gentle words of the old man, "you have promised me to become an honest man. I am purchasing your soul, I withdraw it from the spirit of perversity and I give it to God Almighty." This came back to him incessantly. To this celestial tenderness, he opposed pride, which is the fortress of evil in man. He felt dimly that the pardon of the priest was the hardest assault, and the most formidable attack which he had yet sustained; that the hardness of heart would be complete, if it resisted this kindness; that if he yielded, he must renounce that hatred with which he found satisfaction; that, this time, he must conquer or be conquered, and that the struggle, a gigantic and decisive struggle, had begun between his own wickedness, and the goodness of man.

Until this time he had skillfully caught the whole of them upon the back of his hand. This time the forty-sous coin got away from him, and rolled towards the thicket, near Jean Valjean.

The peculiarity of punishment of this kind, in which what is pitiless, that is to say, what is brutalizing, predominates, is to transform little be little, by a slow stupefactions, a man into an animal, sometimes into a wild beast.

While he wept, the light grew brighter and brighter in his mind — an extraordinary light, a light at once ravishing and terrible... all returned and appeared to him, clearly, but in a light that he had never seen before... There was, however, a softened light upon that life and upon that soul. It seemed to him that he was looking upon Satan by the light of Paradise.

See Monsieur Geborand, buying a pennyworth of paradise.

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night — are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.

For nearly a half hour a great cloud had darkened the sky. At the moment when Jean Valjean paused before the bed the cloud broke as if purposely, and a ray of moonlight crossing the high window, suddenly lighted up the bishop’s pale face…His entire countenance was lit up with a vague expression of content, hope, and happiness. It was more than a smile and almost a radiance. On his forehead rested the indescribable reflection of an unseen light.

Thus, during those nineteen years of torture and slavery, did this soul rise and fall at the same time. Light entered on the one side, and darkness on the other.

A discussion is good... a quarrel is better.

Mothers' arms are made of tenderness, and sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.

Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.

But who ever does attain to his ideal?

I am not in the world to care for my life, but for souls.

No one could say that the passage of that soul before his own, and the reflection of that grand conscience upon his own had not had its effect upon his approach to perfection.

How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself.

The general ... pursued the emperor as if he wished to let him escape.

C’est la souris qui a pris le chat.

Je ne m’appelle pas Fabantou, je ne m’appelle pas Jondrette, je me nomme Thénardier! je suis l’aubergiste de Montfermeil ! entendez-vous bien? Thénardier! Maintenant me reconnaissez-vous?

You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love is to live by it.

Love! A dark and starry transfiguration is mingled with that torment. There is ecstacy in the agony.

Qu’importe à l’infini?

"Let us never fear robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters it what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens our soul."