Nature at times adds her own commentary to our actions with a kind of somber and considered eloquence, as though she were bidding us reflect.
Many people in Paris are quite content to look on at others, and there are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.
M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.
Loving in ignorance, she loved with all the more passion. She did not know whether it was good or evil, beneficent or dangerous, necessary or accidental, eternal or transitory, permitted or prohibited...
Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not from the sentence.
Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not from the sentence. That
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...
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.
It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.
It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awake that slumbering Progress.
It is difficult to frighten those who are easily astonished; ignorance causes fearlessness. Children have so little claim on hell, that if they should see it they would admire it.
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.
I exist, murmurs someone whose name is Everyone. I'm young and in love; I am old and I want rest; I work, I prosper, I do good business, I have houses to rent, money in State Securities; I am happy, I...
How pretty it is here!It was an awful hovel, but she felt free.
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 plainly perceived this truth, the basis of his life henceforth, that so long as she should be alive, so long as he should have her with him, he should need nothing except for her, and fear nothing...
Happy, even in the midst of anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness! He who has not viewed the things of this world and the heart of man under this double light h...
Had he not had a greater purpose, the saving not of his life but of his soul, the resolve to become a good and honourable man and upright man as the bishop required him - had not that been his true a...
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.