Listen, Monsieur Director, here’s what I think. Obviously this is wrong. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms; there are three of us in space enough for sixty. That is wrong, I assure you. You have my house and I am in yours. Give me back mine and this will be your home.
Let misery hide itself in silence, otherwise it becomes treason.
Oh, love! That is to be two, and yet one. A man and a woman joined, as into an angel; that is heaven!
Love each other well and always. There is nothing else but that in the world: love for each other.
Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and our vices, straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls.
As for him, he took the path which shortens, – the Gospel’s.
The light of torches resembles the wisdom of cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles.
Peoples, like planets, possess the right to an eclipse. And all is well, provided that the light returns and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night.
The joy which we inspire has this charming property, that, far from growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us more radiant than ever. At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her running and playing in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh from that of the rest. For Cosette laughed now.
There is nothing like the hand of the populace for building everything that is built by demolishing.
One thing had amazed him, – this was that Jean Valjean should have done him a favor, and one thing petrified him, – that he, Javert, should have done Jean Valjean a favor.
Everything can be parodied, even parody.
You have suffered greatly, poor mother. Oh ! do not lament, you have now the portion of the elect. It is in this way that mortals become angels. It is not their fault ; they do not know how to set about it otherwise. This hell from which you have come out is the first step towards Heaven. We must begin by that.
It was said of him that he had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit to some such legend about us.
Every time that the wind blows it bears with it more of the dreams of men than of the clouds of heaven.
He saw nothing of all this. People who are crushed do not look behind them. They know but too well the evil fate which follows them.
One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two beings fell in love because they looked at each other. That is the way people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way.
In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack.
God was as visible in this affair as was Jean Valjean. God has his instruments. He makes use of the tool which he wills. He is not responsible to men.
The convict was transfigured into Christ.