This man of lofty virtue had three domiciles in Paris solely for the purpose of evading the police.
Errors make excellent projectiles.
Whatever To-day may be, To-morrow will be peace.
The abyss sometimes has these thoughtful ideas; but you will do well to beware of its kindness.
Factions are blind men who aim correctly.
A harmony established contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war.
Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry.
Men had only touched him to bruise him. Every contact with them had been a blow. Never, since his infancy, since the days of his mother, of his sister, had he ever encountered a friendly word and a kindly glance. From suffering to suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a war; and that in this war he was the conquered. He had no other weapon than his hate. He resolved to whet it in the galleys and to bear it away with him when he departed.
Whatever may be happening today, peace is the meaning of tomorrow.
Happy, even in the midst of anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness! He who has not viewed the things of this world and the heart of man under this double light has seen nothing and knows nothing of the true.
To paint a battle requires those mighty artists with chaos in their brush.
Table talk and amorous talk are equally impossible to grasp; amorous talk is all pretty bubbles, table talk, hot air.
He had enlightened Marius by chance and without being aware of the fact, as does a candle which some one brings; he had been the candle and not the some one.
Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled.
Jean Valjean felt his heart melt within him with delight, at all these sparks of a tenderness so exclusive, so wholly satisfied with himself alone. The poor man trembled, inundated with angelic joy; he declared to himself ecstatically that this would last all their lives; he told himself that he really had not suffered sufficiently to merit so radiant a bliss, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted him to be loved thus, he, a wretch, by that innocent being.
It is chiefly at the moment when there is the greatest need for attaching them to the painful realities of life, that the threads of thought snap within the brain.
The memory of an absent being kindles in the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared, the more it beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light on its horizon; the star of the inner night.
What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections of the soul? Man is a depth still greater than the people.
Ah! indeed he must not be mounted. It does not suit his ideas to be a saddle-horse. Every one has his ambition. ‘Draw? Yes. Carry? No.’ We must suppose that is what he said to himself.
When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud, happy, her heart full to overflowing. Jean.