Let us fight.Let us fight, but let us discriminate. The characteristic of truth is never to be extreme. What need has it to exaggerate? There is that which needs to be destroyed, and there is that whi...
Let us be like a bird for a moment perched On a frail branch when he sings;
Let that vile sand which you trample under foot be cast into the furnace, let it melt and seethe there, it will become a splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will discover...
Lavorava per vivere; poi, sempre per vivere, poiché anche il cuore ha fame, amò.
Knowing that she was beautiful, she felt convinced, though in an indistinct way, that she had a weapon. Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.
J'étais dans la mort; tu m'as remise dans la vie. Toi là, c'est le ciel à côté de moi. Donne-moi ta main, que je touche Dieu!
It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer.
In the morning I write love letters and in the afternoon I dig graves
In Burgundy and in the cities of the South the tree of Liberty was planted. That is to say, a pole topped by the revolutionary red bonnet.
In 1804, M. Myriel was the Cure of B—— [Brignolles]. He was already advanced in years, and lived in a very retired manner.
Ignominy thirsts for respect.
If there is anything more heart-breaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light.
I was dying when you came.
I never realized my ugliness till now. When I compared myself with you, I pity myself indeed, poor unhappy monster that I am! I must seem to you like some awful beast, eh? You,-you are a sunbeam, a dr...
I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time at all, and is worth nothing. One breaks one's neck in living. Life is a theatre set in which there are but fe...
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...
He was not to perceive that of two men engaged in an action so hideous, he who permits the thing is worse than the man who does the work, because he is the coward!
He fell to the seat, she by his side. There no more words. The stars were beginning to shine. How was it that their lips met? How is it that the birds sing, the the snow melts, that the rose opens, th...
He did not seek to assume the mantle of Elijah, to shed a light of the future upon the misty turmoil of events or resolve the prevailing light into a single flame; there was in him nothing of the prop...
He baptized his adopted child, and named him Quasimodo, either because he wished to mark in this way the day upon which the child was found, or because he wished to show by this name how imperfect and...