I propose a toast to mirth; be merry! Let us complete our course of law by folly and eating! Indigestion and the digest. let Justinian be the male, and Feasting, the female! Joy the depths! Live, O cr...
One does not cross-examine a saint.
A library implies an act of faith.
So far as Louis XVI. was concerned, I said `no.' I did not think that I had the right to kill a man; but I felt it my duty to exterminate evil. I voted the end of the tyrant, that is to say, the end o...
To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul.
The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his br...
To love is to act.
But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.
Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
[He] had to submit to the fate of every newcomer in a small town, where many tongues talk but few heads think.
One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader in to a nuptial chamber, not into a virginal chamber. Verse would hardly venture it, prose must not.It is the interior of a flower that is not yet...
He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.
A week passed, and Jean Valjean had not taken a step in his room. He still remained in bed. The portress said to her husband:–The good man upstairs yonder does not get up, he no longer eats, he will n...
What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?
Joie est mon caractere,C'est la faute a Voltaire;Misere est mon trousseauC'est la faute a Rousseau.[Joy is my character,'Tis the fault of Voltaire;Misery is my trousseau
I'm religiously opposed to religion.
Change your opinions, keep to your principles change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.
Et puis, tenez, monsieur Marius,je crois que j'étais un peu amoureuse de vous.