"He was fine; he, that orphan that foundling that outcast; he felt himself august and strong; he looked full in the face that society from which he was banished, and into which he had so powerfully intervened; that human justice from which he had snatched its prey; all those tigers whose jaws perforce remained empty; those myrmidons, those judges, those executioners, all that royal power which he, poor, insignificant being, had foiled with the power of God."

"There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees."

"One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas."

"Many great actions are committed in small struggles."

"You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing, my conscience."

"Ecclesiastes names thee Almighty, the Maccabees name thee Creator, the Epistle to the Ephesians names thee Liberty, Baruch names thee Immensity, the Psalms name thee Wisdom and Truth, John names thee Light, the Book of Kings names thee Lord, Exodus names thee Providence, Leviticus Sanctity, Esdras Justice, creation names thee God, man names thee Father; but Solomon names thee Compassion, which is the most beautiful of all thy names."

"Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job."

"It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like."

"Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees."

"Perseverance, secret of all triumphs."

"To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul."

"Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty."

"A miscreant with coiffed, scented hair, a slender waist, the hips of a woman and the chest of a Prussian officer, with a finely tied cravat, by all girls admired."

"Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings."

"There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher."

"Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God."

"When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness."

"I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary."

"Isn't there in every human soul...an initial spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the next, that good can bring out, prime, ignite, set on fire and cause to blaze splendidly, and that evil can never extinguish?"

"Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal."

"Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace."

"The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real."

"Everything bows to success even grammar."

"Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest."

"Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought."

"Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored."

"Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman..."

"Death belongs only to God. What right have men to lay hands on a thing so unknown?"

"People do not read stupidities with impunity."

"The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable."

"The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves."

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

"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 must nearly always say yes or no...The monastery is a renunciation. Self-sacrifice, even when misdirected, is still self-sacrifice. To assume as duty a strict error has its peculiar grandeur."

"As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless."

"He did not seek to assume the mantle of Elijah, to shed a light of the future upon the misty turmoil of events or resolve the prevailing light into a single flame; there was in him nothing of the prophet or the mystic. He was a simple soul who loved, and that was all."

"The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven."

"Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care...Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small number who at lucky! As for the other men, stagnant night is upon them."

"A phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer, that is as simple as the law of the complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man..."

"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 supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves-say rather, loved in spite of ourselves."

"What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul."

"Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping."

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

"A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labour and there is an invisible labour."

"What a grand thing to be loved! What a grander thing still to lovel."

"Another said , "I don't ask six months, I don't ask two. In less than two weeks we'll meet the government face to face. With twenty-five thousand men we can make our stand."

"Loving is half of believing."

"The goodness of the mother is written in the gaiety of the child."

"Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how much better everything would go!"

"Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book."