It had been written with one foot in the grave and a finger in heaven. These lines, falling one by one onto the paper, were what could be called soul drops. Who could these pages come from? Who could have written them? Cosette did not hesitate for a second. There was only one man it could have come from. Him!
Time is greedy, man is greedier.
In the neighborhood she was called the Lark. People like figurative names and were happy to give a nickname to this child, no larger than a bird, trembling, frightened, and shivering, first to wake every morning in the house and the village, always in the street or in the fields before dawn. Except that the poor lark never sang.
In all his trials he was sustained and at times even exalted by a secret strength in himself. The soul aids the body and at moments uplifts it. It is the only bird that can endure a cage.
However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn without ceasing to fly, – therein lies the marvel of genius. 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.
Release is not the same as liberation. You get out of jail, all right, but you never stop being condemned.
Ordinarily it ends in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a swamp.
I tell you, monsieur, it’s the end of the world. The students’ behaviour has never been so outrageous. It’s all these damnable modern inventions that are the ruin of everything.
Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues which have one vice, – error.
This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial, – there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation, – are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed. In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged “a fine farce.
He understood how to say the grandest things in the most vulgar of idioms. As he spoke all tongues, he entered into all hearts.
There comes a day when the young girl glances in this manner. Woe to him who chances to be there! That first gaze of a soul which does not, as yet, know itself, is like the dawn in the sky. It.
One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to the shore.
Love one another dearly, always. Nothing else in the world really matters but that: to love one another.
Les amis de l’abc... a group which barely missed becoming historic.
He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because he was free.
He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.
Why, there’s the air, the sky, the morning, the evening, moonlight, my friends, women, the beautiful architecture of Paris to study, three big books to write and all sorts of other things. Anaxagoras used to say that he was in the world in order to admire the sun. And then I have the good fortune to be able to spend my days from morning to night in the company of a man of genius – myself – and it’s very pleasant.
In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there is something of everything; there is bravery, youth, honor, enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the eager fury of the gamester, and above all, intervals of hope.
Knowing that she was beautiful, she felt convinced, though in an indistinct way, that she had a weapon. Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.