les mis bot

The reader will permit us one other little digression, utterly foreign to this book.

Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose erect before him.

They were souls walled in from this world, with a single door which never opened except to allow the truth to pass through.

It is we who are thermometers. We don’t need to go out and look on the quay at the corner of the Tour de l’Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of cold; we feel our blood congealing in our veins, and the ice forming round our hearts, and we say: ‘There is no God!’

She has become marble in becoming mire.

Before the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult.

…that difference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings of an eagle.

Is he a poor man? Is he a millionaire? Perhaps he is both; that is to say, a thief.

Who knows how easy it is for ambition to call itself vocation?

To meet the needs of this conflict, wretchedness has invented a language of combat, which is slang.

He, Javert, personified justice, light, and truth in their celestial function of crushing out evil.

Queer things had been going on for several days. He wanted no more of them.

“I have been a rose,” says the perfume. “I have loved you,” says the corpse. “I have civilized you,” says the convent.

The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one’s own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of one’s self.

He had the air of an unsuccessful doctor who had turned grave-digger.

What’s the use of being twenty years old?

No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life.

His father did not think of him, and his mother did not love him. He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.

A terrible situation! to be touched. To be granite and to doubt! and suddenly to become aware of the fact that one cherishes beneath one’s breast of bronze something absurd and disobedient which almost resembles a heart!

Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime.

The secrets of the wealthy are sponges of gold; one must know how to subject them to pressure.