Les Misérables

by Victor Hugo

Succeed – that is the lesson drip-dripping down from the corruption at the top.

success is a fairly hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.

Principle of success: prosperity implies capability.

They mistake for the constellations in the infinity of space the star-shaped footprints left by ducks in the soft wetland mud.

For as drops of water may wear holes in a rock, so it is with character. These grooves are indelible. These formations are indestructible.

Human thought knows no boundary. At its peril it analyses and explores its own bedazzlement.

This humble soul loved, that’s all.

under any circumstances the gateway that led to criminality was a bad escape route from poverty.

Yet these details, wrongly called trivial – there is no trivial fact in the affairs of man, no trivial leaf in the vegetable world – do serve a purpose. The features of the years are what the face of the century is composed of.

Books are cold and dependable friends.

With wealth came leisure, which he seemed increasingly to take advantage of to cultivate his mind.

With even the minimum of care, the nettle would be useful. Neglected, it becomes a nuisance. So we kill it. How like the nettle are so many men!’

there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad farmers.’

Curiosity is a form of gluttony. To see is to devour.

There is a spectacle greater than the sea: that is the sky. There is a spectacle greater than the sky: that is the inner soul.

We tell ourselves, talk to ourselves, exclaim to ourselves, while the outward silence remains unbroken. There is a great hubbub. Everything inside us talks except our mouths. The realities of the soul, though not visible and not palpable, are nonetheless realities.

Napoleon was used to looking at war steadily. He never counted the cost in the heart-rending detail of its individual numbers. Numbers mattered little to him, provided they gave this total: victory.

Civilized peoples, especially in our own times, neither rise nor fall by the good or bad fortune of a leader. Their specific weight within the human race results from something more than a conflict.

The fact is, revolution cannot be truly quelled and, being providential and absolutely inevitable, it keeps recurring:

An army is a strangely contrived masterpiece by which force results from an enormous amount of powerlessness.

Later, when you are no longer there, you realize that you cherish those streets, you miss those roofs, windows, doors, you need those walls; that those trees are favourites of yours, those houses never entered you entered every day, and that you have left behind on those cobbles something of your blood and your guts and your heart.

Some things can be unlearned, and rightly so, provided that when one thing is unlearned, another is learned. No vacuum in the human heart.

Let us not put to the torch where it is enough to bring light.

There is no non-being. Zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

Man lives by affirmation much more than by bread.

one of those men who become a curious sight only because they have lived a long time, and who are strange because they once looked like everyone else and now there is not another soul that looks like them.

To be ultra is to go to extremes.

It is in the nature of undertows to create turbulence, hence some very peculiar combinations of ideas.

favour illumination over conflagration. A fire can certainly create a glow, but why not wait for daybreak? A volcano gives light, but dawn gives even better light.

For the fact is, there is perpetuity in rightfulness.

Rightfulness is everlastingly persistent in its protest against such doings. There is no statute of limitation on the theft of a nation. These great swindles have no future.

A nation’s identity cannot be removed like the initials from a pocket handkerchief.

For many great feats are performed in small struggles.

Life, adversity, isolation, abandonment, poverty are battlefields that have their heroes, the obscure sometimes greater than the illustrious.

Some people have wanted wrongly to identify the bourgeoisie as a class. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented section of the people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair is not a caste.

Fair distribution should be understood to mean not equal but equitable distribution. The fundamental equality is equity.

Social prosperity means the happiness of man, the freedom of the citizen, the greatness of the nation.

nothing is more dangerous than to stop working. It is a habit you lose. A habit easy to give up and difficult to resume.

Thought is the exertion of the intellect, daydreaming is its indulgence. To replace thought with daydreaming is to mistake a poison for sustenance.

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater vision? You choose.

People are beginning to understand that while there might be power in a boiler, there can be no authority except in a brain.

In other words, what lead and drive the world are not locomotives, but ideas. Harness locomotives to ideas, fair enough, but do not mistake the horse for the rider.

Are you what is called a happy man? Well, you are sad every day. Every day has its great sorrow or petty anxiety.

One cloud clears, another forms. Hardly one day in a hundred that is entirely joyous, entirely sunny. And you are one of that small number who are happy! As for the rest of mankind, stagnant night is upon them.

The real human division is this: the enlightened and the benighted.

Even if you have knowledge and even if you have love, you will still suffer. Each day begins with tears. The enlightened weep, if only for the benighted.

Marius had not lived long enough to know that nothing is more imminent than the impossible, and that what you must always expect is the unexpected.

But though his strength was gone, his willpower was not. He got up again.

Nothing matches the longevity of a pile of stones, except that of a fence made of wooden planks. They are there temporarily. No wonder they last!

Now that everything in existence is an extended carnival, there is no longer any carnival.