Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he sat up, a long stream of blood rolled down his face, he raised both arms in air, looked in the direction whence the shot came, and began to sing.
Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
To contemplate is to look at shadows.
The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.
Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy.
To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.
But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God’s fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.
It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.
One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one’s soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.
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.
Whenever a man’s friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
One sometimes says: ‘He killed himself because he was bored with life.’ One ought rather to say: ‘He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.’