Les Misérables

by Victor Hugo

For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.

In contrast with these men, wild, we admit, and terrible, but wild and terrible for the good, there are other men, smiling, embroidered, gilded, beribboned, in silk stockings, in white feathers, in yellow gloves, in polished shoes, who, leaning on a velvet table beside a marble mantel, softly insist on the maintenance and preservation of the past, the Middle Ages, divine right, fanaticism, ignorance, slavery, the death penalty, and war, glorifying politely and in mild tones the saber, the stake, and the scaffold. As for us, if we were compelled to choose between the barbarians of civilization and the civil advocates of barbarism, we would choose the barbarians.

To diminish the number of the dark, to increase the number of the luminous, there is the aim. That is why we cry: education, knowledge! To learn to read is to kindle a fire; every syllable spelled sparkles.

For everything there is a theory that proclaims itself “common sense”; Philinte against Alceste; mediation offered between the true and the false; explanation, admonition, a somewhat haughty extenuation, which because it is a mixture of blame and excuse, thinks itself wisdom and is often mere pedantry.

At certain moments, everything seems impossible; at others, everything appears easy;

The pupil dilates in the night, and at last finds day in it, even as the soul dilates in misfortune, and at last finds God in it.