L’ignorance vaut encore mieux que la mauvaise science.
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.
La dicha que habría podido encontrar en la tierra si ella no hubiera sido gitana ni él sacerdote; si Febo no hubiera existido y si ella lo hubiera amado.
Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.
Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious, though in an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon. Women play with their beauty as children do with a knife. They wound themsel...
It is necessary that society should look at these things, because it is itself which creates them.
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...
In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.
Il dort. Quoique le sort fut pour lui bien étrange,Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n’eut plus son ange.La choise simplement d’elle-même arriva.Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s’en va.He is asleep....
If you wish to gain an idea of what revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of the nature of progress, call it To-morrow.
If anyone had said to him, Would you like to be better off? he would have replied: No. If God had said to him: Would you like heaven itself in exchange? he would have replied, I would be the loser.
I would rather be the head of a fly than the tail of a lion.
I think, therefore I doubt.
I shall die while he sleeps. The two slumbers may be good neighbors. The
I mean that man is ruled by a tyrant whose name is Ignorance, and that is the tyrant I sought to overthrow. That is the tyrant which gave birth to monarchy, and monarchy is authority based on falsehoo...
However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn without ceasing to fly,—therein lies the marvel of geni...
How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand?
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...
He had slipped, climbed, rolled, searched, walked, persevered, that is all. Such is the secret of all triumphs.
He had enlightened Marius by chance and without being aware of the fact, as does a candle which some one brings; he had been the candle and not the some one.