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

…Nobody knows like a woman how to say things that are both sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is Heaven.

À ceux qui ignorent, enseignez-leur […]Le coupable n’est pas celui qui y fait le péché, mais celui qui y a fait l’ombre.

Flat ubi vult

L’ me qui aime et qui souffre est à l’état sublime.

Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.

Let us reflect, if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen.

How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the...

France bleeds, but liberty smiles, and before the smile of liberty, France forgets her wound.

He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.Nothing is more sublime.

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.

Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like...

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because...

She let her head fall back upon Marius’ knees and her eyelids closed. He thought that poor soul had gone. Eponine lay motionless; but just when Marius supposed her for ever asleep, she slowly opened...

In love there are no friends everywhere where there is a pretty woman hostility is open.

Wonderful nature has a double meaning, which dazzles great minds and blinds uncultivated souls. When man is ignorant, when the desert is filled with visions, the darkness of solitude is added to the darkness of...

Joy is the reflex of terror.

What makes night within us may leave stars.

He had the confidence of a man who had never been wounded.

Artistes, orateurs, prophètes, hommes-colosses comme Danton, hommes-enfants comme Cloots, gladiateurs et philosophes, tous allaient au même but, le progrès. Rien ne les déconcertait. La grandeur de la Convention fut de chercher la quantité de réel...

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

Il vient une heure où protester ne suffit plus ; après la philosophie il faut l’action ; la vive force achève ce que l’idée a ébauché.

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

La vie, le malheur, l’isolement, l’abandon, la pauvreté, sont des champs de bataille qui ont leurs héros ; héros obscurs plus grands parfois que les héros illustres.

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...