Victor Hugo

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.