It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no mor...
Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were trembling for the health of one who is dear to you, today you fear for your own; tomorrow it will be an anxiety about...
Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.
He sought...to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars.
I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.
It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves—say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
This cavern is below all, and the enemy of all; it is hatred, without exception.
Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.
People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed ...
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.
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 so loved by this innocent being." -Jean Valjean about...
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 so loved by this innocent being." He said to himself ...
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 asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appea...
This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one ...
Questa luce, cioè la storia, è spietata; essa ha questo di strano e di divino, e cioè che quantunque sia luce, e precisamente perché è luce, mette spesso dell'ombra là dove si vedono raggi; dello stesso uomo fa due fantasmi differenti, e l'uno ...
Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.
You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.
