Les Miserables Quotes

“Let us be just, my friends! What a splendid destiny for a nation to be the Empire of such an Emperor, when that nation is France and when it adds its own genius to the genius of that man! To appear and to reign, to march and to triumph, to have for halting-places all capitals, to take his grenadiers and to make kings of them, to decree the falls of dynasties, and to transfigure Europe at the pace of a charge; to make you feel that when you threaten you lay your hand on the hilt of the sword of God; to follow in a single man, Hannibal, Caesar, Charlemagne; to be the people of some one who mingles with your dawns the startling announcement of a battle won, to have the cannon of the Invalides to rouse you in the morning, to hurl into abysses of light prodigious words which flame forever, Marengo, Arcola, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram! To cause constellations of victories to flash forth at each instant from the zenith of the centuries, to make the French Empire a pendant to the Roman Empire, to be the great nation and to give birth to the grand army, to make its legions fly forth over all the earth, as a mountain sends out its eagles on all sides to conquer, to dominate, to strike with lightning, to be in Europe a sort of nation gilded through glory, to sound athwart the centuries a trumpet-blast of Titans, to conquer the world twice, by conquest and by dazzling, that is sublime; and what greater thing is there?"

"To be free," said Combeferre.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Do not cry for me, I am already dead."
"No, not dead, the dead at least are free.”
― Kester Grant, The Court of Miracles

“It will come, citizens, the day when all shall be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it will come, and it is so that it may come that we are going to die.”
― Victor Hugo

“Those are rare who fall without becoming degraded; there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, a fatal word, Les Misérables.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I understand only love and liberty.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

“An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred. It must be cast down. This monstrous mass must be made to crumble. To conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase: the fortunate and the unfortunate. In this world, evidently the vestibule of another, there are no fortunate.

The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous — that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.

However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn without ceasing to fly — therein lies the marvel of genius.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as densely populated as a city, as tremulous as a nest, as tenebrous as a cathedral, as aromatic as a bouquet, as lonely as a tomb, as much a living thing as a crowd.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Moreover that which is called, far too harshly in certain
cases, the ingratitude of children, is not always a thing so
deserving of reproach as it is supposed. It is the ingratitude
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of nature. Nature, as we have elsewhere said, ‘looks before
her.’ Nature divides living beings into those who are arriving
and those who are departing. Those who are departing
are turned towards the shadows, those who are arriving towards
the light. Hence a gulf which is fatal on the part of the
old, and involuntary on the part of the young. This breach,
at first insensible, increases slowly, like all separations of
branches. The boughs, without becoming detached from
the trunk, grow away from it. It is no fault of theirs. Youth
goes where there is joy, festivals, vivid lights, love. Old age
goes towards the end. They do not lose sight of each other,
but there is no longer a close connection. Young people feel
the cooling off of life; old people, that of the tomb. Let us not
blame these poor children.”
― Victor Hugo

“The slashers have finished; it was the turn of the thinkers. The century that Waterloo was intended to arrest has pursued its march. That sinister victory was vanquished by liberty.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“A clock does not stop at the very moment you lose the key.”
― Victor Hugo

“He sleeps, though fate for him was truly odd.
He lived. He died when his angel was gone.
The thing just happened of its own accord
As night comes on when day is gone.”
― Victor Hugo

“And whatever he did, he always fell back onto this paradox at the core of his thought. To remain in paradise and become a demon! To re-enter hell and become an angel!”
― Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

“It is because revolution cannot be really conquered, and that being providential and absolutely fatal, it is always cropping up afresh”
― Victor Hugo

“The Republic in the sovereignty of civil right restored to the masses, the Empire in the sovereignty of the French idea imposed on Europe; he beheld the grand figure of the people emerge from the Revolution, and the grand figure of France spring forth from the Empire.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The country wails, that may be, but humanity applauds. But is it true that the country does wail? France bleeds, but liberty smiles; and in the presence of liberty's smile, France forgets her wound.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“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. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“As cidades, tal como as florestas, têm os seus antros onde se oculta tudo o que têm de pior e de mais temível. A única diferença é que, nas cidades, o que se esconde assim é feroz, imundo e pequeno, ou seja, feio; nas florestas, o que se esconde é feroz, selvagem e grande, ou seja, belo. Tocas por tocas, as dos animais são preferíveis às dos homens, As cavernas valem mais do que as pocilgas,”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“First problem: To produce wealth.

Second problem: To share it.

The first problem contains the question of labor.

The second contains the question of salary.

In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.

In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.

From the proper employment of forces results public power.

From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.

By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must be understood.

From these two things combined, the public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity.

Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is complete on one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some, all privations for the rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly, feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation, which sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral element enters.

Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem. They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it.

The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The two problems must be combined and made but one.

…Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor, suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal, so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor, an easier matter than is generally supposed; in two words, learn how to produce wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have at once moral and material greatness; and you will be worthy to call yourself France.”
― hugo

“In winter the thicket was dark, wet, shaggy and shivering, and allowed a glimpse of the house. Instead of blossom on the branches and dew on the blossom you saw the long silvery ribbon-trails of slugs on the cold thick carpet of yellow leaves. But always, in all its guises, in all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this tiny enclosure exuded melancholy, contemplation, solitude, freedom, the absence of man, the presence of God. And the rusty old gate seemed to say, 'This garden belongs to me.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Germination embraces in its complexity the explosion of a meteor and the breaking of the eggshell by the peck of the swallow's beak, and is equally responsible for the birth of an earthworm and the coming of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater vision? You choose. A patch of mould is a constellation of flowers. A nebula is an ant's nest of stars.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“He wondered if all this happiness really belonged to him, if it was not made up of someone else's happiness--this child's happiness which he in his old age was confiscating and appropriating--and if this was not robbery. He told himself, this child had a right to experience life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in advance of all the joys of life, and to some extent without consulting her, under the pretext of sparing her from all its tribulations, to take advantage of her ignorance and her isolation in order to foster in her a spurious vocation, was to pervert the nature of a human being and to lie to God. And who knows if Cosette, understanding all this some day and wishing she had not become a nun, would not come to hate him? A last thought, this; almost selfish and less heroic than the others, but one that was intolerable to him. He decided to leave the convent.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I'm going," cried Gavroche. And pausing just as he was starting, "By the way, you'll give me his musket?”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Well, well," he said, "you still have your lamps here. That's not proper form, my friends. It's disorderly. Sorry, this will have to go!" And he threw the stone into the lamp.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“We shall be grasshoppers among the stars. And then we shall see God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“We, who do not believe what these women believe, but who, like them, live by faith, have never been able to contemplate without a kind of compassionate and religious anguish, a kind of pity full of envy, those devout, quaking, trusting creatures, those humble, noble souls who dare to live on the very brink of mystery, waiting, between the world on which they have closed the door and a heaven that remains unopen, turned towards the invisible light with the sole joy of thinking they know where it is, aspiring to the abyss and the unknown, their eyes fixed on the still darkness, kneeling, overwhelmed, amazed, trembling, half raised at times by the deep breaths of eternity.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“He sleeps, though fate for him was truly odd.
He lived. He died when his angel was gone.
The thing just happened of its own accord
As night comes on when day is done.”
― Victor Hugo

“This is how it started, 
with a sister weeping in her bed, 
a child so terrified she sold herself to a thief, 
a girl so lovely, the world went to war to possess her”
― Kester Grant

“Su felicidad era la meta de mi vida. Ahora ya puede Dios firmar mi hoja de salida. Cosette, eres feliz; ya he cumplido mi tiempo.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Miserables volume 1-2

“Well, good night," he said. "I'm off to the elephant with my kids. On the supposition that you should need me some night, you'll find me there. I live on the second floor. There is no doorman. You should ask for Monsieur Gavroche.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Miserables