It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.
Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men.
The ox suffers, the cart complains.
No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.
If you don’t build castles in the air you won’t build anything on the ground.
Loving is half of believing.
Freedom begins where it ends ignorance.
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.