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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.

-Victor Hugo

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Whether We Be Italians

Victor Hugo

...

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.

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Enthusiasm Is The Fever Of Reason.

A Few Feet Under The Ground Reigns So Profound A Silence, And Yet So Much Tumult On The Surface!

The Drama Is Complete Poetry. The Ode And The Epic Contain It Only In Germ; It Contains Both Of Them In A State Of High Development, And Epitomizes Both.

Table Talk And Lovers' Talk Equally Elude The Grasp; Lovers' Talk Is Clouds, Table Talk Is Smoke.

Wonderful Nature Has A Double Meaning, Which Dazzles Great Minds And Blinds Uncultivated Souls. When Man Is Ignorant, When The Desert Is Filled With Visions, The Darkness Of Solitude Is Added To The Darkness Of Intelligence; Hence, In Man, The Possibilities Of Perdition

When Two Souls Have Finally Found Each Other, There Is Established Between Them A Union Which Begins On Earth And Continues Forever In Heaven.

Reality In Strong Doses Frightens.

Teach The Ignorant As Much As You Can; Society Is Culpable In Not Providing A Free Education For All And It Must Answer For The Night Which It Produces. 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.

God Knows Better Than We Do What We Need.

There Are No Weeds, And No Worthless Men. There Are Only Bad Farmers.

Great Blunders Are Often Made, Like Large Ropes, Of A Multitude Of Fibres.

Wisdom Is The Health Of The Soul.

God In His Harmony Has Equal Ends For Cedar That Resists And Reed That Bends; For Good It Is A Woman Sometimes Rules, Holds In Her Hand The Power, And Manners, Schools, And Laws, And Mind; Succeeding Master Proud, With Gentle Voice And Smiles She Leads The Crowd, The Somber Human Troop.

Virtue Has A Veil, Vice A Mask.

We Need Those Who Pray Constantly To Compensate For Those Who Do Not Pray At All.

God Has Made The Cat To Give Man The Pleasure Of Caressing The Tiger.

Nothing Makes A Man So Adventurous As An Empty Pocket.

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.

When The Heart Is Dry The Eye Is Dry.

I Have Examined The Death Penalty Under Each Of Its Two Aspects: As A Direct Action, And As An Indirect One. What Does It Come Down To? Nothing But Something Horrible And Useless, Nothing But A Way Of Shedding Blood That Is Called A Crime When An Individual Commits It, But Is Sadly Called "justice" When Society Brings It About. Make No Mistake, You Lawmakers And Judges, In The Eyes Of God As In Those Of Conscience, What Is A Crime When Individuals Do It Is No Less An Offense When Society Commits The Deed.

The Spirit Of God, Like The Sun, Always Gives All Its Light At Once. The Spirit Of Man Resembles The Pale Moon, Which Has Its Phases, Its Absences And Its Returns, Its Lucidity And Its Spots, Its Fullness And Its Disappearance, Which Borrows All Its Light From The Rays Of The Sun, And Which Still Dares To Intercept Them On Occasion.

We Teachers Make The Road, Others Will Make The Journey.

A Bit Of Mould Is A Pleiad Of Flowers; A Nebula Is An Ant-hill Of Stars.

The Sewer Is The Conscience Of The City.

There Is Something More Terrible Than A Hell Of Suffering--a Hell Of Boredom.

Every Bird Which Flies Has The Thread Of The Infinite In Its Claw. Germination Includes The Hatching Of A Meteor And The Tap Of A Swallow's Bill Breaking The Egg, And It Leads Forward The Birth Of An Earth-worm And The Advent Of Socrates.

The Quantity Of Civilization Is Measured By The Quality Of Imagination.

Too Much Improvisation Leaves The Mind Stupidly Void.

In Saying No To Progress, It Is Not The Future Which They Condemn, But Themselves. They Give Themselves A Melancholy Disease; They Inoculate Themselves With The Past. There Is But One Way Of Refusing Tomorrow, That Is To Die.

Love Each Other Dearly Always. There Is Scarcely Anything Else In The World But That: To Love One Another.

The Earlier Works Of A Man Of Genius Are Always Preferred To The Newer Ones, In Order To Prove That He Is Going Down Instead Of Up.

To Destroy Abuses Is Not Enough; Habits Must Also Be Changed. The Windmill Has Gone, But The Wind Is Still There." ~old Man G--- To Monseigneur Bienvenu Myriel

To Love Is The Half Of To Believe.

Ma Vie Est Une énigme Dont Ton Nom Est Le Mot. (my Life Is An Enigma, Of Which Your Name Is The Word.)

There Are Things Stronger Than The Strongest Man.

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!

The Beautiful Has But One Type, The Ugly Has A Thousand.

The Sunshine Was Delightful, The Foliage Gently Astir, More From The Activity Of Birds Than From The Breeze. One Gallant Little Bird, Doubtless Lovelorn, Was Singing His Heart Out At The Top Of A Tall Tree.

Go Out In The World And Work Like Money Doesn't Matter, Sing As If No One Is Listening, Love As If You Have Never Been Hurt, And Dance As If No One Is Watching.

If It Were (is It Not) Outrageous That Society Should Treat With Such Rigid Precision Those Of Its Members Who Were Most Poorly Endowed In The Distribution Or Wealth That Chance Had Made, And Who Were, Therefore, Most Worthy Of Indulgence.

Her Soul Trembled On Her Lips Like A Drop Of Dew On A Flower.

One Can No More Keep The Mind From Returning To An Idea Than The Sea From Returning To A Shore. For A Sailor, This Is Called The Tide; In The Case Of The Guilty It Is Called Remorse. God Stirs Up The Soul As Well As The Ocean.

For Dogs We Kings Should Have Lions, And For Cats, Tigers. The Great Benefits A Crown.

We Say And Exclaim Within Ourselves Without Breaking Silence, In A Tumult Where Everything Speaks Except Our Mouths. The Realities Of The Soul Are None The Less Real For Being Invisible And Impalpable.

His Universal Compassion Was Due Less To Natural Instinct, Than To A Profound Conviction, A Sum Of Thoughts That In The Course Of Living Had Filtered Through To His Heart: For In The Nature Of Man, As In Rock, There May Be Channels Hollowed By The Dropping Of Water, And These Can Never Be Destroyed.

Popularity - A Piece Of Faded Tinsel, That Is Out Of Date.

There Is A Material Advancement; We Desire It. There Is, Also, A Moral Grandeur; We Hold Fast To It.

Nothing Is More Dangerous Than Discontinued Labor; It Is Habit Lost. A Habit Easy To Abandon, Difficult To Resume.

He Who Is Not Capable Of Enduring Poverty Is Not Capable Of Being Free.

The Holy Law Of Jesus Christ Governs Our Civilisation, But It Does Not Yet Permeate It.

A Doctor’s Door Should Never Be Closed, A Priest's Door Should Always Be Open.

To Be Wicked Does Not Insure Prosperity - For The Inn Did Not Succeed Well.

Large, Heavy, Ragged Black Clouds Hung Like Crape Hammocks Beneath The Starry Cope Of The Night. You Would Have Said That They Were The Cobwebs Of The Firmament.

Habit Is The Nursery Of Errors.

The Greatest Products Of Architecture Are Less The Works Of Individuals Than Of Society; Rather The Offspring Of A Nation's Effort, Than The Inspired Flash Of A Man Of Genius.

We Are Reassured Almost As Foolishly As We Are Alarmed; Human Nature Is So Constituted.

It Is Not So Easy To Keep Silent When The Silence Is A Lie.

People Do Not Read Stupidities With Impunity.

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.

Being Good Is Easy, What Is Difficult Is Being Just.

I Was Dying When You Came.

Progress Is The Life-style Of Man.

Great Griefs Exhaust. They Discourage Us With Life. The Man Into Whom They Enter Feels Something Taken From Him. In Youth, Their Visit Is Sad; Later On, It Is Ominous.

I Am For Religion, Against Religions.

Against Religion

Women Play With Their Beauty As Children Do With Their Knives. They Wound Themselves With It.

Houses Are Like The Human Beings That Inhabit Them.

Does Not Beauty Confer A Benefit Upon Us, Even By The Simple Fact Of Being Beautiful?

The World Is The Expanding Greece And Greece Is The Shrinking World.

No Doubt It Was Necessary To Civilize Man In Relation To Man. That Work Is Already Advanced And Is Making Progress Every Day. But Man Must Be Civilized Also In Relation To Nature.

A Woman's Best Qualities Are Harmful If Undiluted With Prudence.

A Man Trying To Escape Never Thinks Himself Sufficiently Concealed.

Often When We Think We Are Knotting One Thread, We Are Tying Quite Another.

All Roads Are Blocked To A Philosophy Which Reduces Everything To The Word "no." To "no" There Is Only One Answer And That Is "yes." Nihilism Has No Substance. There Is No Such Thing As Nothingness, And Zero Does Not Exist. Everything Is Something. Nothing Is Nothing. Man Lives More By Affirmation Than By Bread.

When A Man Understands The Art Of Seeing, He Can Trace The Spirit Of An Age And The Features Of A King Even In The Knocker On A Door.

Those Who Always Pray Are Necessary To Those Who Never Pray.

Why Worry About What Threatens Our Heads Or Purses? Let Us Think Instead Of What Threatens Our Souls.

Dreaming Is Happiness. Waiting Is Life.

Diamonds Are Found Only In The Dark Bowels Of The Earth; Truths Are Found Only In The Depths Of Thought. It Seemed To Him That After Descending Into Those Depths After Long Groping In The Blackest Of This Darkness, He Had At Last Found One Of These Diamonds, One Of These Truths, And That He Held It In His Hand; And It Blinded Him To Look At It. (pg. 231)

He Is The Best Gentleman That Is The Son Of His Own Deserts, And Not The Degenerated Heir Of Another's Virtue.

A Stout Heart May Be Ruined In Fortune But Not In Spirit.

God Whose Gifts In Gracious Flood Unto All Who Seek Are Sent, Only Asks You To Be Good And Is Content.

Vengeance Comes From The Individual And Punishment From God.

The Man Is Placed Where The Earth Ends, The Woman, Where The Heaven Starts.

The Great Acts Of Love Are Done By Those Who Are Habitually Performing Small Acts Of Kindness.

The Poor Man Shuddered, Overflowed With An Angelic Joy; He Declared In His Transport That This Would Last Through Life; 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.

And Then, Strange To Say, The First Symptom Of True Love In A Young Man Is Timidity; In A Girl, It Is Boldness.

Whatever Causes Night In Our Souls May Leave Stars.

Science Says The First Word On Everything, And The Last Word On Nothing.

Everything Being A Constant Carnival, There Is No Carnival Left.

Love Would Never Be A Promise Of A Rose Garden Unless It Is Showered With Light Of Faith, Water Of Sincerity And Air Of Passion. Sometimes We Make Love With Our Eyes. Sometimes We Make Love With Our Hands. Sometimes We Make Love With Our Bodies. Always We Make Love With Our Hearts. If I Could Reach Up And Hold A Star For Every Time You've Made Me Smile, The Entire Evening Sky Would Be In The Palm Of My Hand. To Love Another Person Is To See The Face Of God.

[t]he Small Is Great, The Great Is Small; All Is In Equilibrium In Necessity.

Beauty Is As Useful As The Useful. More So, Perhaps. (le Beau Est Aussi Utile Que L'utile. Plus Peut-etre.)

Well, For Us, In History Where Goodness Is A Rare Pearl, He Who Was Good Almost Takes Precedence Over He Who Was Great.

There Are Plenty Who Regard A Wall Behind Which Something Is Happening As A Very Curious Thing.

No Matter Who You Are, The Thought Of So Much Suffering And Degradation Must Cause You To Shudder At The Sight Of A Veil Or Cassock, Those Two Shrouds Of Human Invention.

How Did It Happen That Their Lips Came Together? How Does It Happen That Birds Sing, That Snow Melts, That The Rose Unfolds, That The Dawn Whitens Behind The Stark Shapes Of Trees On The Quivering Summit Of The Hill? A Kiss, And All Was Said.

Nature Is Pitiless; She Never Withdraws Her Flowers, Her Music, Her Fragrance, And Her Sunlight From Before Human Cruelty Or Suffering.

Reason Is Intelligence Taking Exercise. Imagination Is Intelligence With An Erection.

Pain Is As Diverse As Man. One Suffers As One Can.

My Misfortune Is That I Still Resemble A Man Too Much. I Should Liked To Be Wholly A Beast Like That Goat. - Quasimodo

A Phenomenon Often Seen. A Sceptic Adhering To A Believer; That Is As Simple As The Law Of The Complementary Colours. What We Lack Attracts Us. Nobody Loves The Light Like The Blind Man.

Do Not Ask The Name Of The Person Who Seeks A Bed For The Night. He Who Is Reluctant To Give His Name Is The One Who Most Needs Shelter.

A Republic May Be Called The Climate Of Civilization.

Initiative Is Doing The Right Thing Without Being Told.

Follow Your Heart

Short As Life Is, We Make It Still Shorter By The Careless Waste Of Time.

I'm Not In The World To Guard My Own Life, But To Guard Souls

The Soul Has Greater Need Of The Ideal Than Of The Real

There Is In Every Village A Torch - The Teacher; And An Extinguisher - The Priest.

The Beginning As Well As The 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 And Incessant Desire To Injure Some Living Being, It Matters Not Who.

The Persistence Of An All-absorbing Idea Is Terrible.

Youth Is The Future Smiling At A Stranger, Which Is Itself.

There Are Moments When A Rope's End, A Pole, The Branch Of The Tree, Is Life Itself, And It Is A Frightful Thing To See A Living Being Lose His Hold Upon It, And Fall Like A Ripe Fruit.

Promise To Give Me A Kiss On My Brow When I Am Dead. --i Shall Feel It." She Dropped Her Head Again On Marius' Knees, And Her Eyelids Closed. He Thought The Poor Soul Had Departed. Eponine Remained Motionless. All At Once, At The Very Moment When Marius Fancied Her Asleep Forever, She Slowly Opened Her Eyes In Which Appeared The Sombre Profundity Of Death, And Said To Him In A Tone Whose Sweetness Seemed Already To Proceed From Another World:-- "and By The Way, Monsieur Marius, I Believe That I Was A Little Bit In Love With You.

To Meditate Is To Labour; To Think Is To Act. Folded Arms Work, Closed Hands Perform, A Gaze Fixed On Heaven Is A Toil.

I Think I Missed My Calling. I Should Have Been An Interior Decorator.

Ideas Can No More Flow Backward Than Can A River.

Almost All Our Desires, When Examined, Contain Something Too Shameful To Reveal.

A Smile Is The Same As Sunshine; It Banishes Winter From The Human Countenance.

In The Animal World No Creature Born To Be A Dove Turns Into A Scavenger. This Happens Only Among Men.

It Is The End. But Of What? The End Of France? No. The End Of Kings? Yes.

I Would Rather Be The Head Of A Fly Than The Tail Of A Lion.

Lastly, This Threefold Poetry Flows From Three Great Sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible Before The Iliad, The Iliad Before Shakespeare.

Phenomena Intersect; To See But One Is To See Nothing.

He Loved Books; Books Are Cold But Safe Friends.

A Joyous Little Creature, So Beautiful, It Was As If A Gate Of Heaven Opened As She Came In.

The Clouds, - The Only Birds That Never Sleep.

...though We Chisel Away As Best We Can At The Mysterious Block From Which Our Life Is Made, The Black Vein Of Destiny Continually Reappears.

The Human Soul Has Still Greater Need Of The Ideal Than Of The Real. It Is By The Real That We Exist; It Is By The Ideal That We Live.

Oh! Everything I Loved!

The Real, Native South Seas Food Is Lousy. You Can't Eat It.

Out Milky Way Is The Dwelling; The Nebulae Are The City.

The Supreme Happiness Of Life Is The Conviction That We Are Loved.

Who Then Understands The Reciprocal Flux And Reflux Of The Infinitely Great And The Infinitely Small, The Echoing Of Causes In The Abysses Of Being, And The Avalanches Of Creation?

No Army Can Withstand The Strength Of An Idea Whose Time Has Come.

There Exists, At The Bottom Of All Abasement And Misfortune, A Last Extreme Which Rebels And Joins Battle With The Forces Of Law And Respectability In A Desperate Struggle, Waged Partly By Cunning And Partly By Violence, At Once Sick And Ferocious, In Which It Attacks The Prevailing Social Order With The Pin-pricks Of Vice And The Hammer-blows Of Crime.

The Heart Becomes Heroic Through Passion. It Is No Longer Composed Of Anything But What Is Pure; It No Longer Rests Upon Anything But What Is Elevated And Great.

There Is Such A Thing As The Pressure Of Darkness.

Love Has No Middle Term; Either It Destroys, Or It Saves. All Human Destiny Is This Dilemma. This Dilemma, Destruction Or Salvation, No Fate Proposes More Inexorably Than Love. Love Is Life, If It Is Not Death. Cradle; Coffin, Too. The Same Sentiment Says Yes And No In The Human Heart. Of All The Things God Has Made, The Human Heart Is The One That Sheds Most Light, And Alas! Most Night.

So Long As Ignorance And Poverty Exist On Earth, Books Of The Nature Of Les Miserables Cannot Fail To Be Of Use.

The Ode Lives Upon The Ideal, The Epic Upon The Grandiose, The Drama Upon The Real.

Youth, Even In Its Sorrows, Always Has A Brilliancy Of Its Own.

This Conflict Between Right And Fact Has Endured Since The Origins Of Society. To Bring The Duel To An End, To Consolidate The Pure Ideal With The Human Reality, To Make The Right Peacefully Interpenetrate The Fact, And The Fact The Right, This Is The Work Of The Wise.

To Rescue From Oblivion Even A Fragment Of A Language Which Men Have Used And Which Is In Danger Of Being Lost -that Is To Say, One Of The Elements, Whether Good Or Bad, Which Have Shaped And Complicated Civilization -is To Extend The Scope Of Social Observation And To Serve Civilization.

All The Human And Animal Manure Which The World Wastes, If Returned To The Land, Instead Of Being Thrown Into The Sea, Would Suffice To Nourish The World.

The Production Of Souls Is The Secret Of Unfathomable Depth.

To Pay Compliments To The One We Love Is The First Method Of Caressing, A Demi-audacity Venturing. A Compliment Is Something Like A Kiss Through A Veil.

Progress Is The Stride Of God.

Another Story Must Begin!

Adversity Makes Men, And Prosperity Makes Monsters.

All That Was Neither A City, Nor A Church, Nor A River, Nor Color, Nor Light, Nor Shadow: It Was Reverie. For A Long Time, I Remained Motionless, Letting Myself Be Penetrated Gently By This Unspeakable Ensemble, By The Serenity Of The Sky And The Melancholy Of The Moment. I Do Not Know What Was Going On In My Mind, And I Could Not Express It; It Was One Of Those Ineffable Moments When One Feels Something In Himself Which Is Going To Sleep And Something Which Is Awakening.

It Was She. Whoever Has Loved Knows All The Radiant Meaning Contained In The Three Letters Of This Word ‘she.

Sublime Upon Sublime Scarcely Presents A Contrast, And We Need A Little Rest From Everything, Even The Beautiful.

Every Day Has Its Great Grief Or Its Small Anxiety. ... One Cloud Is Dispelled, Another Forms. There Is Hardly One Day In A Hundred Of Real Joy And Bright Sunshine.

Let Us Leave To The Brain What Belongs To It, And Agree That The Work Of The Men Of Genius Is Of The Superhuman, The Offspring Of Man.

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.

Reaction - A Boat Which Is Going Against The Current But Which Does Not Prevent The River From Flowing On.

To See So Much Misery Everywhere, I Suspect That God Is Not Rich. He Keeps Up Appearances, It Is True, But I Feel The Pinch. He Gives A Revolution As A Merchant, Whose Credit Is Low, Gives A Ball.

No Religion But Blasphemes A Little.

Not Ill? No Truly, I Am Young, Healthful, And Strong; The Blood Flows Freely In My Veins; My Limbs Obey My Will; I Am Robust In Mind And Body, Constituted For A Long Life. Yes, All This Is True; And Yet, Nevertheless, I Have An Illness, A Fatal Illness,-an Illness Given By The Hand Of Man!

The Owl Goes Not Into The Nest Of The Lark.

Ah," Cried Gavroche, "what Does This Mean? It Rains Again! ...if This Continues, I Withdraw My Subscription.

One Is Not Idle Because One Is Absorbed. There Is Both Visible And Invisible Labor. To Contemplate Is To Toil, To Think Is To Do. The Crossed Arms Work, The Clasped Hands Act. The Eyes Upturned To Heaven Are An Act Of Creation.

The English Took The Eagle And Austrians The Eaglet. [fr., L'angleterre Prit L'aigle, Et L'autriche L'aiglon.]

Revery, Which Is Thought In Its Nebulous State, Borders Closely Upon The Land Of Sleep, By Which It Is Bounded As By A Natural Frontier.

When Grace Is Joined With Wrinkles, It Is Adorable. There Is An Unspeakable Dawn In Happy Old Age.

Positive Thinking

This First Glance Of A Soul Which Does Not Yet Know Itself Is Like Dawn In The Heavens; It Is The Awakening Of Something Radiant And Unknown.

The Parisian Is To The French What The Athenian Was To The Greeks: No One Sleeps Better Than He, No One Is More Openly Frivolous And Idle, No One Appears More Heedless. But This Is Misleading. He Is Given To Every Kind Of Listlessness, But When There Is Glory To Be Won He May Be Inspired With Every Kind Of Fury. Give Him A Pike And He Will Enact The Tenth Of August, A Musket And You Have Austerlitz. He Was The Springboard Of Napoleon And The Mainstay Of Danton. At The Cry Of "la Patrie" He Enrols, And At The Call Of Liberty He Tears Up The Pavements. Beware Of Him!

All Animals Are To Be Found In Men And Each Of Theme Exists In Some Man, Sometimes Several At The Time.

At The Moment When Her Eyes Closed, When All Feeling Vanished In Her, She Thought That She Felt A Touch Of Fire Imprinted On Her Lips, A Kiss More Burning Than The Red-hot Iron Of The Executioner.

I Wanted To See You Again, Touch You, Know Who You Were, See If I Would Find You Identical With The Ideal Image Of You Which Had Remained With Me And Perhaps Shatter My Dream With The Aid Of Reality. -claude Frollo

From A Political Point Of View, There Is But One Principle, The Sovereignty Of Man Over Himself. This Sovereignty Of Myself Over Myself Is Called Liberty

Not Being Heard Is No Reason For Silence.

Idleness Is A Mother. She Has A Son, Robbery, And A Daughter, Hunger.

Close By The Rights Of Man, At The Least Set Beside Them, Are The Rights Of The Spirit.

There Is But One Way Of Refusing To-morrow, That Is To Die.

What Is History? An Echo Of The Past In The Future; A Reflex From The Future On The Past.

At That Moment Of Love, A Moment When Passion Is Absolutely Silent Under Omnipotence Of Ecstasy, Marius, Pure Seraphic Marius, Would Have Been More Capable Of Visiting A Woman Of The Streets Than Of Raising Cosette’s Dress Above The Ankle. Once On A Moonlit Night, Cosette Stopped To Pick Up Something From The Ground, Her Dress Loosened And Revealed The Swelling Of Her Breasts. Marius Averted His Eyes.

To Study In Paris Is To Be Born In Paris!

My Revenge Is Fraternity! No More Frontiers! The Rhine For Everyone! Let Us Be The Same Republic, Let Us Be The United States Of Europe, Let Us Be The Continental Federation, Let Us Be European Liberty, Let Us Be Universal Peace!

And If It Happened To Be A Christmas-night When The Great Bell Seemed To Rattle In Its Throat As It Called The Faithful To The Midnight Mass, There Was Such An Indescribable Air Of Life Spread Over The Sombre Facade That The Great Door-way Looked As If It Were Swallowing The Entire Crowd, And The Rose-window Staring At Them.

A Wedding Is Not House-keeping.

Superstitions, Bigotries, Hypocrisies, Prejudices, These Phantoms, Phantoms Though They Be, Cling To Life; They Have Teeth And Nails In Their Shadowy Substance, And We Must Grapple With Them Individually And Make War On Them Without Truce; For It Is One Of Humanity's Inevitabilities To Be Condemned To Eternal Struggle With Phantoms.

Smallness In A Great Man Seems Smaller By Its Disproportion With All The Rest.

Joy's Smile Is Much Closer To Tears Than Laughter.

What Says The Law? You Will Not Kill. How Does It Say It? By Killing!

He Had Not Yet Lived Long Enough To Have Discovered That Nothing Is More Close At Hand Then The Impossible, And That What Must Be Looked For Is Always The Unforeseen.

Wide Horizons Lead The Soul To Broad Ideas; Circumscribed Horizons Engender Narrow Ideas; This Sometimes Condemns Great Hearts To Become Small Minded.broad Ideas Hated By Narrow Ideas,-this Is The Very Struggle Of Progress.

Wisdom Is A Sacred Communion.

Mirrors, Those Revealers Of The Truth, Are Hated; That Does Not Prevent Them From Being Of Use.

The Convent, Which Belongs To The West As It Does To The East, To Antiquity As It Does To The Present Time, To Buddhism And Muhammadanism As It Does To Christianity, Is One Of The Optical Devices Whereby Man Gains A Glimpse Of Infinity.

"animals Are Happy," Said The Queen. "they Run No Risk Of Going To Hell." "they Are There Already," Replied Josiana.

. . .where There Is No More Hope, Song Remains.

The Power Of A Glance Has Been So Much Abused In Love Stories, That It Has Come To Be Disbelieved In. Few People Dare Now To Say That Two Beings Have Fallen In Love Because They Have Looked At Each Other. Yet It Is In This Way That Love Begins, And In This Way Only.

Religion, Society, And Nature--these Are The Three Struggles Of Man.

There Are People Who Observe The Rules Of Honor As One Observes The Stars, From A Great Distance.

Who Among Us Has Not Sought Peace In A Song?

Every Blade Has Two Edges; He Who Wounds With One Wounds Himself With The Other.

Marius And Cosette Did Not Ask Where This Would Lead Them. They Looked At Themselves As Arrived. It Is A Strange Pretension For Men To Ask That Love Should Lead Them Somewhere.

His Whole Life Was Now Summed Up In Two Words: Absolute Uncertainty Within An Impenetrable Fog.

Sometimes He Used A Spade In His Garden, And Sometimes He Read And Wrote. He Had But One Name For These Two Kinds Of Labor; He Called Them Gardening. ‘the Spirit Is A Garden,’ Said He

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