God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give them endless duration.
There exist beings who, for the sake of obtaining the key to these enigmas, which are, moreover, of no consequence whatever to them, spend more money, waste more time, take more trouble, than would be required for ten good actions, and that gratuitously, for their own pleasure, without receiving any other payment for their curiosity than curiosity.
If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love.
She was satisfied after the manner of that Arab woman, who, having received a box on the ear from her husband, went to complain to her father, and cried for vengeance, saying: “Father, you owe my husband affront for affront.” The father asked: “On which cheek did you receive the blow?” “On the left cheek.” The father slapped her right cheek and said: “Now you are satisfied. Go tell your husband that he boxed my daughter’s ears, and that I have accordingly boxed his wife’s.
An army is a strange masterpiece of combination where force results from an enormous sum of impotence.
Invading armies can be resisted, invading ideas cannot be.
The words passive obedience indicate this. An army is a strange masterpiece of combination where force results from an enormous sum of impotence. Thus is war, made by humanity against humanity, despite humanity, explained.
There exist crab-like souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness, retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to augment their deformity, growing-incessantly worse, and becoming more and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness.
In these aspirations, much more than in deliberate, rational coordinated ideas, is the real character of a man to be found. Our chimeras are the things which the most resemble us. Each.
The shades, those sombre hatchers of primitive Christianity, only awaited an opportunity to bring about an explosion under the Caesars and to inundate the human race with light. For in the sacred shadows there lies latent light. Volcanoes are full of a shadow that is capable of flashing forth. Every form begins by being night. The catacombs, in which the first mass was said, were not alone the cellar of Rome, they were the vaults of the world.
The peculiar property of truth is never to commit excesses. What need has it of exaggeration? There.
Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it.
Happiness and despair do not breathe the same air. A man in despair participates in the life of others from a great distance; he is almost unaware of their presence; he has lost any consciousness of his own existence; he is a thing of flesh and blood but feels that he is no longer real; he sees himself only as a dream.
He flew into a rage on every occasion, most frequently when wrong.
The beautiful is as useful as the useful.” He added after a pause, “More so, perhaps.
The two friends set out towards “Eve’s Apple.” It is unnecessary to mention that they had first gathered up the money, and that the archdeacon followed them.
The men of yesterday are spectres; those of to-morrow are forms. The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but obscurely. The embryonic work of the future is one of the visions of philosophy.
Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.
What is admirable in the clash of young minds is that no one can foresee the spark that sets off an explosion or predict what kind of explosion it will be.
Facts are sometimes like a hailstorm. They bombard you; they deafen you.