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Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives,
many tongues talk but few heads think.
Everything on this earth is subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.”
The great dangers are within us.
The best men have their blind spots, and sometimes they feel almost crushed at how little respect logic can show them.
People weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them.
What becomes of the handful of leaves of the young tree when it is felled?
Liberation is not deliverance. A convict may leave prison behind but not his sentence.
Light is not lost where love enters.
Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.
The child was not afraid.
A man trying to escape never believes himself sufficiently concealed.
Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.
to think is to act.
even gravediggers must die. By dint of digging graves for others, they open their own.
“It means I am my father’s son.”
who had but one fault; that was to have too dearly loved two ingrates, his country and me.”
To err is human, to loaf is Parisian.
Skepticism, that dry rot of the intellect,
What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man.
their existence is not their own; it is the other side of a destiny not their own.
They look at one another, they know one another.
Tragedy in a wig has its reason for being, and I am not one of those who, in the name of Aeschylus, deny it the right to exist.
Life is a hideous invention of somebody I don’t know.
Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices in virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes.
Hurrah for Brutus! He slew. That’s virtue. Virtue, but folly, too. There are some odd stains on these great men.
“Citizen,” said Enjolras to him, “my mother is the Republic.”
In poverty bodies cling close together, as in the cold, but hearts grow distant.
occasionally the dog is no less startling than the wolf.
Often, thinking to knot one thread, we tie another.
Jean Valjean’s silence veiled Fantine with night.
what leads and controls the world is not locomotives but ideas.
