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Albert Camus, who saw as much conflict as Hugo, said: ‘I abhor comfortable violence. I abhor those whose words go further than their deeds.’
Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle
thirteen hundred and twenty thousand
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He was forbearing towards women and the poor on whom the burden of human society falls. He said, ‘The failings of women, children and servants, of the feeble, the destitute and the ignorant, are the fault of their husbands, fathers and masters, of the strong, the rich and the learned.’
‘Teach those who are ignorant as much as you can. Society is to blame for not giving free education. It’s responsible for the darkness it produces. In any benighted soul – that’s where sin will be committed. It’s not he who commits the sin that’s to blame but he who causes the darkness to prevail.’
great-great-uncle of the author of this book,
The beautiful is just as useful as the useful.’ He added after a pause, ‘Perhaps more so.’
‘Never fear robbers or murderers. Those are dangers that come from without. Small dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers. Vices are the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. Never mind what endangers our life or our purse! Let’s be mindful only of what endangers our soul.’
So what use is the Eternal Father? The Jehovah hypothesis bores me, monsieur l’évêque. All it can do is produce people of no substance, who ring hollow. Down with the great Whole that drives me to distraction! Long live Nothingness that leaves me alone!
Let’s enjoy life. Life is all. The idea that man has another future elsewhere, up above, down below, wherever – I don’t believe a single word of it.
‘Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, what we recognize is this: the human race has had a rough time, but it has advanced.’
It must be said that even in that political opinion for which we have just criticized him, and which we are inclined to judge almost severely, he was tolerant and easy-going, more so perhaps than the person who writes these words.
Let it be said in passing, success is a fairly hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.
Principle of success: prosperity implies capability. Win the lottery and you are a clever man. Whoever wins is respected. Be born lucky, that is all. If luck is yours, the rest will follow. Be fortunate and you will be thought great.
They mistake for the constellations in the infinity of space the star-shaped footprints left by ducks in the soft wetland mud.
appal,
appall
The oppressed do not look behind them. They know only too well the ill fate that dogs them.
there are several people still alive who remember her account of it in every detail.
A brief parenthesis here. This is the second time in his studies of the penal issue and the doom meted out by the law that the author of this book has come across the theft of a loaf of bread as the starting-point in ruining a life. Claude Gueux75 stole a loaf of bread. Jean Valjean stole a loaf of bread. According to one English statistic, the primary cause of four out of five thefts in London is hunger.
Release is not freedom. You are let out of prison, but you continue to serve your sentence.
‘Jean Valjean, my brother, you’re no longer owned by evil but by good. It’s your soul I’m buying. I’m redeeming it from dark thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I’m giving it to God.’
They were unexceptional young men – everyone has seen their type: four average specimens, neither good nor bad, learned nor ignorant, geniuses nor fools, with the handsome looks of that delightful springtime we call the age of twenty.
Poverty and love of finery are two disastrous counsellors. One scolds and the other flatters, and beautiful young girls of humble origin have both whispering in their ears, one on either side.
You felt like biting into the lovely little darling’s apple cheeks.
These individuals belonged to that bastard class between the so-called middle class and the so-called lower class, which is made up of crass people who have come up in the world and clever people who have gone down, and combines some of the faults of the latter with nearly all the vices of the former without having the generous impulse of the working man or the law-abiding decency of the solid citizen. They were of that stunted nature that easily turns monstrous if some dark passion is by chance kindled in them.
flowering orviot
‘My friends, remember this: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad farmers.’
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that you are loved, loved for yourself, better still, loved despite yourself.
There is no loss of light in having love.
monarchism impeding progress portrayed as anarchy;
Meanwhile, let us study things that are no more. We need to be familiar with them, if only to avoid them. The spurious things of the past assume false names and pass themselves off as the future. This spectre, the past, is liable to falsify its own passport. Let us be prepared for that pitfall. Let us be on our guard. The past has a face, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy. Let us expose that face and tear off that mask.
A prince is nothing beside a principle.
All radiance of social beneficence emanates from science, literature, the arts, education. Create men, create men. Illuminate them so they may reflect warmth on you. Sooner or later the splendid issue of universal education will present itself with the irresistible authority of absolute truth, and then those who govern under the scrutiny of the French idea will have to make this choice: the children of France or the gamins of Paris, beacons in the light or will-o’-the-wisps in the dark.
A paragon of her type, Mademoiselle Vaubois was the white ermine of stupidity without a single fleck of intelligence.
At the same time his ideas underwent an extraordinary change. There were numerous successive phases in this change. As this has been the experience of many minds of our time, we think it will be useful to follow these phases step by step and chart them all. He was bewildered by this history he had just begun to study. The first impression it made on him was dazzling.
He was full of regret and remorse, and reflected with despair that he could speak only to a grave, now, of all that he had in his soul.
She liked him better for seeing so little of him. Not seeing people means they can be assumed to have every perfection.
The sweetheart was a tomb.
He wanted society to work unfailingly at raising moral and intellectual standards, popularizing science, putting ideas into circulation, developing the minds of young people; and he was afraid that the inadequacy of the methods currently employed, the woeful narrowness of literary outlook confined as it was to two or three so-called classic centuries, the tyrannical dogmatism of the official pedants, scholastic prejudices and learning by rote, would end up turning our schools into artificial oysterbeds.
He looked like a caryatid on holiday, with nothing to support but his reverie.
For many great feats are performed in small struggles. There are dogged deeds of valour, overlooked, that hold out step by step in the darkness against the fatal onslaught of destitution and depravity. Noble and mysterious triumphs that no eye sees, no renown honours, no fanfare salutes.
There are fathers who do not love their children. There is no grandfather that does not adore his grandson.
Flora of the Environs of Cauterets
He was at that stage in life when the mind of the thinking man consists in nearly equal proportion of profundity and naivety. Given a serious situation, he had everything it takes to be stupid. With some fine tuning, he could be sublime.
There is a moment when girls blossom in the twinkling of an eye, and all at once become roses. You left them yesterday as children, you come back today and find them disquieting.
What he had just seen was no longer the ingenuous and uncomplicated gaze of a child, it was a mysterious chasm that had opened up, then abruptly closed again. There comes a day when every girl has such a look. Pity the man who happens to be there!
One day that winter the sun appeared briefly in the afternoon, but it was the second of February, Candlemas, according to ancient tradition the day whose treacherous sun, harbinger of six weeks’ cold weather, inspired in Mathieu Laensberg255 these two lines, still rightly regarded as classic: A glimpse or a glimmer of sun And the bear goes back to its den.
Groudhog Day
Rue Mouffetard,
