The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
I’m religiously opposed to religion.
Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.
No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.
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.
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.
Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.
Liberation is not deliverance.
It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-sufficient we think it! How, being in possession of the false aim of life, happiness, we forget the true aim, duty!
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
Despotism is a long crime.
By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.
When liberty returns, I will return.
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.
Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.