I’d like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don’t know. It doesn’t last, and it’s good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.
So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened.
Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.
The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
Progress is the stride of God.
God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.
We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.
The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.
M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.
Nobody loves the light like the blind man.
One drop of wine is enough to redden a whole glass of water.
Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.
Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.
It is man’s consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.
There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.
The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it constantly blaze with noble lessons of courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history and form one of man’s guiding lights.
Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.
God has made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger.
A republic may be called the climate of civilization.
Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment.