When the heart is dry the eye is dry.
To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!
The wise man is he who knows when and how to stop.
Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish.
We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult where everything speaks except our mouths. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.
What love commences can be finished by God alone.
A doctor’s door should never be closed, a priest’s door should always be open.
Oh! Everything I loved!
He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.
I didn’t believe it could be so monstrous. It’s wrong to be so absorbed in divine law as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men tough that unknown thing?
Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.
A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.
The memory of an absent person shines in the deepest recesses of the heart, shining the more brightly the more wholly its object has vanished: a light on the horizon of the despairing, darkened spirit; a star gleaming in our inward night.
And so, being in Heaven, it was easy for him to lose sight of earth.
Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.
There are moments when a rope’s end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.
In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D – – He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D – – since 1806.
You are adorable, mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope.
The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.
She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger.