"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."

"You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it."

"Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled."

"The senator...was a smart man who had made his way in life with a single-mindedness oblivious to any of those stumbling blocks known as conscience, sworn oaths, justice, duty..."

"The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas."

"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."

"No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come."

"Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander."

"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 life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the exterior also...True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything."

"Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul."

"His ideas assumed a kind of stupefied and mechanical quality which is peculiar to despair."

"A mother who loses her child can no longer believe in God."

"The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten."

"One believes others will do what he will do to himself."

"Common sense is in spite of not the result of education."

"There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson."

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

"The sins of women and children, domestic servants and the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the sins of the husbands and fathers, the masters, the strong and the rich and the educated."

"Sorrow is a fruit God does not allow it to grow on a branch that is too weak to bear it."

"A man may beg, but a woman has to sell."

"The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring."

"Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars. Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out of a dark background."

"This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls, --what declaimers!"

"To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth."

"A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it."

"The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment's silence, "Perhaps more so."

"That it was no doubt a dark hour, but that he should get through it; that after all he held his destiny, evil as it might be, in his own hand; that he was master of it. He clung to that thought."

"A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil."

"Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization."

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

"Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved."

"The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised."

"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old."

"The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state."

"History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man."

"But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed."

"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. God is awake."

"Despotism is a long crime."

"I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning."

"In moments like these, offering up his heart at the hour that night flowers offer up their perfume, lit up like a lamp in the middle of the starry night, full of ecstasy in the middle of the universal radiance of creation, he could not perhaps have said himself what was happening in his spirit; he felt something soar up out of him and something fly down into him. Mysterious exchanges between the bottomless well of the soul and the bottomless well of the universe!"

"Life is the flower for which love is the honey."

"Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good."

"God will reward you,' he said. 'You must be an angel since you care for flowers."

"Many people in Paris are quite content to look on at others, and there are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing."

"What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?"

"Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing."

"We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution."

"Without seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, he gazed upon it. He did not study God; he was dazzled by Him."

"From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty."

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