222 quotes found
“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 pr...”
“The French Revolution, which is nothing more nor less than the ideal armed with the sword, rose abruptly, and by that very movement, closed the door of evil and opened the door of good.It released ...”
“Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men”
“There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.”
“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...”
“Progress is not accomplished in one stage.”
“It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.”
“Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.”
“Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.”
“People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back.They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake.”
“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 martyrdo...”
“There is, we are aware, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, classified as pathologic, that denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness. To set up a theory tha...”
“The night was starless and very dark. Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.”
“Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.”
“Everyone has noticed the taste which cats have for pausing and lounging between the two leaves of a half-shut door. Who is there who has not said to a cat, Do come in! There are men who, when an in...”
“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 wil...”
“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 ...”
“She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asle...”
“Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Facts are one, ideas are the other.”
“A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.”
