I have a dream my life would be. So different from this hell I’m living. So different now from what it seem. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.”*Fantine

Life’s great happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold… brilliant but threatened on all sides...

Dream no small dreams. They have no power to stir the hearts of men.

When the nettle is young, the leaves make excellent greens; when it grows old it has filaments and fibers like hemp and flax. Cloth made from the nettle is as good as that made from...

Though one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one accepts the religion of the temple nearest at hand.

That figure stood for a long time wholly in the light; this arose from a certain legendary dimness evolved by the majority of heroes, and which always veils the truth for a longer or shorter...

To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.

At five in the morning, some policemen, unannounced, entered the house of a man named Pardon, later a member of the section of the Barricade-Merry, and still later killed in the insurrection of April 1834,...

Formerly these harsh cells in which the discipline of the prison leaves the condemned to himself were composed of four stone walls, a ceiling of stone, a pavement of tiles, a camp bed, a grated...

Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.

The life of the cenobite is a human problem. When we speak of convents, those seats of error but innocence, of mistaken views but good intentions, of ignorance but devotion, of torment but martyrdom, we...

Monsieur, innocence is its own crown! Innocence has only to act to be noble! She is as august in rags as fleur de lys.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.

Equality, citizens, is not the whole of society on a level, a society of tall blades of grass and small oaks, or a number of entangled jealousies. It is, legally speaking, every aptitude having the...

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

Penser, voilà le triomphe vrai de l’ me.

Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! And do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He has done more–he has given...

La philosophie est le microscope de la pensée.

Come fu che le loro labbra s’incontrarono? Come avviene che l’uccello canta, che la neve si scioglie, che la rosa sboccia, che maggio dà i suoi fiori, che l’alba imbianca dietro gli alberi neri le...

Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.

If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?,’ she will answer, ‘He is my child.

The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation’s effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius…

The earth is a great piece of stupidity.

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved — loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

I see black light (his last words)

However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. To whom did...

What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow...

So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine...

It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory

Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.

Revolution is the accession of the peoples, and, at the bottom, the People is Man.

No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden...

Le livre, comme livre, appartient à l’auteur, mais comme pensée, il appartient -le mot n’est pas trop vaste- au genre humain. Toutes les intelligences y ont droit. Si l’un des deux droits, le droit de...

Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with the other.

Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.

This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.

In joined hands there is still some token of hope, in the clinched fist none.

Sans la moindre métaphore et dans toute l’acception du mot, vivre, c’est brûler.

I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

Loving is half of believing.

He had to accept the fate of every newcomer to a small town where there are plenty of tongues that gossip and few minds that think.

Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon...

While a battle still entirely political was preparing in this same place which had already seen so many revolutionary events, while the youth, the secret associations, the schools in the name of principles, and the...

He who every morning plans the transactions of that day and follows that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.

Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Facts are one, ideas are the other.

Elle était morte avec cette joie tragique des cœurs jaloux qui entraînent l’être aimé dans leur mort, et qui disent : personne ne l’aura !

Listen, Monsieur Director, here’s what I think. Obviously this is wrong. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms; there are three of us in space enough for sixty. That is wrong,...

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.”À qui la faute? (1872)

Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.