"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 quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said."

"Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder."

"Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly."

"The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; 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."

"Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause."

"A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing."

"Enjolras caught glimpses of a luminous uprising under the dark skirts of the future."

"He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601."

"Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men."

"The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man."

"I'm religiously opposed to religion."

"...Man has a tyrant, ignorance. I voted for the demise of that particular tyrant. That particular tyrant has engendered royalty, which is authority based on falsehood, whereas science is authority based on truth. Man should be governed by science alone.""And conscience," added the bishop."It's the same thing. Conscience is the quota of innate science we each have inside us."

"Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. To replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food."

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

"People do not lack strength they lack will."

"His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own."

"To contemplate is to look at shadows."

"As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer."

"Be like the bird that passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight feels them give way beneath her and yet sings knowing that she hath wings."

"To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!"

"The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them."

"He was fond of saying, "There is a bravery of the priest as well as the bravery of a colonel of dragoons,--only," he added, "ours must be tranquil."

"The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live."

"Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh."

"Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery."

"If no one loved, the sun would go out."

"The terrible shock of his sentence had in some way broken that wall which separates us from the mystery of things beyond and which we call life."

"The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side."

"At the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of Heaven fills those who are quitting the light of Earth."

"Not being heard is no reason for silence."

"Progress is not accomplished in one stage."

"Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence."

"To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark."

"There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling."

"There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing."

"Police chiefs don't think a cat can possibly turn into a lion; and yet, it happens."

"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."

"She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white."

"All this ferment was public, we might almost say tranquil.The imminent insurrection gathered its storm calmly in the face of the government. No singularity was lacking in this crisis, still subterranean, but already perceptible. The middle class talked quietly with workingmen about the preparations. They would say, "How is the uprising coming along?" in the same tone in which they would have said, " How's your wife?"

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

"Those who always pray are necessary to those who never pray."

"When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide."

"A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground."

"They are les misA©rables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?"

"When liberty returns, I will return."

"Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man."

"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, found him standing not far from his bed, with cartridges in his hands, caught in the act."

"In that pallid and sullen shadow in which he crawled, whenever he turned his head and endeavoured to raise his eyes, he saw, with mingled rage and terror, forming, massing, and mounting up out of sight above him with horrid escarpments, a kind of frightful accumulation of things, of laws, of prejudices, of men, and of acts, the outlines of which escaped him, the weight of which appalled him, and which was no other than that prodigious pyramid that we call civilization."

"A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it's pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment."

"The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God."