Red is an all-embracing colour,' said the bishop. 'How fortunate that those who despise it in a bonnet revere it in a hat.
Protect the workers, encourage the rich.
Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to...
Poor old Jean Valjean, of course, loved Cosette only as a father; but, as we noted earlier, into this fatherly love his lonely single status in life had introduced every other kind of love; he loved C...
Police chiefs don't think a cat can possibly turn into a lion; and yet, it happens.
Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discove...
Paris has a child, and the forest has a bird; the bird is called the sparrow; the child is called the gamin. Couple these two ideas which contain, the one all the furnace, the other all the dawn; stri...
PREFACIOMientras exista, a consecuencia de las leyes y de las costumbres, una condena social que cree artificialmente infiernos en plena civilización, y enturbie con una fatalidad humana el destino, q...
Ordinarily it ends in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ide...
One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two beings fell in love because they looked at each other. That is the way people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way.
One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. In the case of the sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse....
On the contrary, as there is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher, everything was given away, so to speak, before it was received, like water on thirsty soil...
Nisi Dominus custodierit domum, in vanum vigilant qui custodiunt eam, Unless the Lord guard the house, in vain do they watch who guard it.
Monsieur, innocence is its own crown. Innocence has no truck with highness. It is as august in rags as it is draped in the fleur-de-lis.
Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.
Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard the future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and summing up a revolut...
Madame Magloire sometimes called him ‘Your Highness.’ One day, rising from his armchair, he went to his library for a book. It was on one of the upper shelves, and as the bishop was rather short, he c...
Love partakes of the soul itself. it is of the same nature. like it, it is a divine spark, like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable, it is the point of fire which is within us, which is...
Love is the only ecstasy, everything else weeps.
Love is a fault; so be it.