Les Miserables Quotes

Progress must believe in God. The good cannot be served by impiety. An atheist is an evil leader of the human race.

Whom man kills God restores to life; whom the brothers pursue the Father redeems. Pray and believe and go onward into life.”

He who knows the answer to this knows all things. He is alone. His name is God.

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.

It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.

Not being heard is no reason for silence.

Laughter is sunshine, it chases winter from the human face.

He who does not weep does not see.

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

To owe life to a malefactor . . . to be, in spite of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice . . . to betray society in order to be true to his own conscience; that all these absurdities . . . should accumulate on himself—this is what prostrated him.

He sought to counsel and soothe the despairing by pointing to the resigned, and to transform the grief which sees only a pit into the grief with sees a star.

The notary who becomes a deputy, the hack playwright who produces a mock-Corneille, the eunuch who acquires a harem, the journeyman-general who by accident wins the decisive battle of an epoch. [...] All this is what men call genius, just as they call a painted face beauty and a richly attired figure majesty. They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

Did any voice whisper to him that he was at a turning-point in his life, that henceforth there could be no middle way for him, that he must become either the best of men or the worst, rise even higher than the bishop himself or sink lower than the felon, reach supreme heights of goodness or become a monster of depravity?

The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself.

We are not among those who sing the praises of war; we tell the truth about it when the need arises. War has tragic splendors which we have not sought to conceal, but it also has its especial squalors, among which is the prompt stripping of the bodies of the dead. The day following a battle always dawns on naked corpses.

The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.

There are people who observe the rules of honor as we do the stars, from a very long way off.

It is a charming quality of the happiness we inspire in others that, far from being diminished like a reflection, it comes back to us enhanced.

In a word, they wanted Progress, that hallowed, good, and gentle thing, and they demanded it in a terrible fashion, with oaths on their lips and weapons in their hands. They were barbarous, yes; but barbarians in the cause of civilization. [...] For our part, if we had to choose between the barbarians of civilization and those civilized upholders of barbarism, we would choose the former.

Since there is always more misery in the depths than compassion in the heights, everything was given, so to speak, before it was received

There are men who dig for gold; he dug for compassion. Poverty was his goldmine; and the universality of suffering a reason for the universality of charity.

Excess of suffering, as we have seen, had made him in some sort a visionary.

They were eyes no longer, but had become those fathomless mirrors which in men who have known the depths of suffering may replace the conscious gaze, so that they no longer see reality but reflect the memory of past events.

The fiercest animals are disarmed by a tribute to their young. The mother thanked her and invited her to sit on the bench by the door while she herself remained seated on the step.

His mental attitude was compounded of two very simple principles, admirable in themselves but which, by carrying them to extremes, he made almost evil – respect for authority and hatred of revolt against it.

Ill-treatment had made her sullen and misery had made her ugly. Only the beauty of her eyes remained, and this was the more distressing because, being large, they mirrored a greater measure of unhappiness.

For she learned to laugh, and as she did so her whole appearance changed, its darkness was dispelled.

[You] do not care for the cruder aspect of truth. Christ cared. He drove the money-lenders from the temple. His scourge was a great teller of truths.