Les Miserables Quotes

Les Miserables (1862) is a novel by Victor Hugo that many consider one of the greatest works of world literature. It tells the intertwined lives of characters in the last decades of the 19th century, focusing mainly on the conflict between the hero Jean Valjean, a fugitive who spent nearly 20 years of his life as a prisoner "24601" and the police inspector Javert, who is hunting for him. Others who figure prominently are orphans Valjean Cosette stands as a girl, Marius the revolutionary who loves him, and had Thenardier Cosette exploited horribly wrong until he was rescued by Valjean.

It was originally published in five volumes, four named after some of the main characters in it. The primary translation used in the creation of this collection of sayings is that Charles E. Wilbour.

Les Miserables Quotes:

Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do. (p. 1)

As there is always more misery at the lower end than humanity at the top, everything was given away before it was received, like water on parched soil. (p. 8)

We do not claim that the portrait we present here is a true one, only that it comes close. (p. 9)

buying a pennyworth of paradise (p. 12)

If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness. (p. 14)

We may be indifferent to the death penalty and not declare ourselves either way so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when we do, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to choose sides, for or against... Death belongs to God alone. (p. 16)

Solomon names thee Compassion, and that is the most beautiful of all thy names. (p.19)

Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. (p. 27)

He who has not been a determined accuser during prosperity should hold his peace in adversity. (p. 48)

In passing, we might say that success is a hideous thing. Its false similarity to merit deceives men...They confuse heaven's radiant stars with a duck's footprint left in the mud. (p. 51-52)

A character, as well as a rock, may have holes worn into it by drops of water. (p. 53)

The Heroism of Passive Obedience (Title of Fantine, Bk II, Chapter 3)

Monsieur to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea. Ignominy thirsts for respect. (p.76)

Jean Valjean entered the galleys sobbing and trembling; he left hardened. He entered in despair; he left sullen. What had happened within the soul? (p.87)

Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right. (p.89)

Liberation is not deliverance. A convict may leave prison behind but not his sentence. (p.97)

His brain was in one of those violent, yet frighteningly calm, states where reverie is so profound it swallows up reality. We no longer see the objects before us, but we see, as if outside of ourselves, the forms we have in our minds. (p. 112)

All people of common sense agreed that the era of revolutions had been closed forever by King Louis XVIII (p. 117)

A thing that smoked and clacked along on the Seine, making the noise of a swimming dog, came and went beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV; it was a machine of little value, a kind of toy, the daydream of a visionary, a utopia -- a steamboat. The Parisians regarded the useless thing with indifference. (p. 118)

Cuvier, with one eye on the book of Genesis and the other on nature, was endeavoring to calm reactionary bigotry by reconciling fossils with texts and making the mastodons support Moses. (pp. 118-19)

That day was sunshine from start to finish. All nature seemed to be on a vacation. The flower beds and lawns of Saint-Cloud were balmy with perfume; the breeze from the Seine vaguely stirred the leaves; the boughs were gesticulating in the wind; the bees were pillaging the jasmine; a whole bohemian crew of butterflies had settled in the yarrow, clover, and wild oats. The stately park of the King of France was invaded by a swarm of vagabonds, the birds. (p. 127)

All things considered, sire, there is nothing to fear from these people. They are as carefree and lazy as cats. The lower classes in the provinces are restless, those in Paris are not...They are not dangerous. In sum: dependable riffraff. (p. 131)

That a cat may change into a lion, prefects of police do not believe possible; this can happen, nonetheless. (p. 131)

The Parisian is to Frenchmen what the Athenian was to Greeks: Nobody sleeps better than he, nobody is more frivolous and idle than he, nobody seems to forget things more easily than he; but best not trust him nonetheless; he has adapted to all sorts of indolence, but when there is glory to be gained, he is wondrous at every kind of fury. (pp. 131-132)

This uninspired play on words had the effect of a stone thrown into a country pond...All the frogs fell silent. (p. 134)

Each of our passions, even love, has a stomach that must not be overloaded. We must in all things write the word finis in time; we must restrain ourselves, when it becomes urgent, draw the bolt on the appetite, play a fantasia on the violin, then break the strings with our own hand. (p. 135)

Mother's arms are made of tenderness, and sweet sleep blesses the child who lies within. (p. 147)

The most ferocious animals are disarmed by caresses to their young. (p. 150)

For Cosette, read Euphrasie. The name of the little one was Euprhasie. But the mother had made Cosette out of it, by that sweet and charming instinct of mothers and of the people, who change Josefa into Pepita, and Francoise into Sillette. It is a kind of derivation that confuses and disconcerts the entire science of etymology. (p. 151)

There are souls that, crablike, crawl continually toward darkness, going backward in life rather than advancing, using their experience to increase their deformity, growing continually worse, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in the intensifying viciousness. (p. 153)

For he knew how to do a little of everything--all badly. (p. 154)

There are certain natures that cannot have love on one side without hatred on the other. (p. 156)

Mayor Madeline: "The two highest functionaries of the state are the wet nurse and the school teacher." (p. 161)

When they saw him making money, they said "He is a merchant." When they saw the way in which he scattered his money, they said, "He is ambitious. "When they saw him refuse honors, they said, "He is an adventurer."When they saw him repel the advances of the fashionable, they said, "He is a brute." (p. 162-3)

A good mayor is a good thing. Are you afraid of the good you might do? (p. 163)

Mayor Madeline: "If we took a little time, the nettle would be useful; we neglect it, and it becomes harmful. Then we kill it. Men are so like the nettle! There are no bad herbs, and no bad men; there are only bad cultivators." (p. 164-165)

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves--say rather, loved in spite of ourselves (p. 167)

This man was a compound of two sentiments, simple and good in themselves, but he made them almost evil by his exaggeration of them: respect for authority and hatred of rebellion. (p. 171 about Javert)

For prying into other people's affairs, none are equal to those of whom it is no concern. (p. 178)

A soul for a piece of bread. Misery makes the offer; society accepts. (p.187)

If they were richer, we should say they are dandies; if they were poorer, we should say they are tramps. They are simply idlers. (p.189)

One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For the sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean. (p.225)

Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour. (p. 191)

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! (p. 235)

In less than two hours, all the good he had done was forgotten. (p. 295)

The sunshine was enchanting: the branches of the trees had that gentle tremor of May that seems to come from the birds' nests more than from the wind. A hardy little bird, probably in love, was desperately singing away in a tall tree. (p. 302)

Beside this door were a dung-hill, mattocks and shovels, some carts, an old well with its flagstone and iron pulley, a frisky colt, a strutting turkey, a chapel topped by a little steeple, an espaliered pear tree in bloom, against the wall of the chapel; such was the court whose conquest was Napoleon's dream. This bit of earth, if he could have taken it, would perhaps have given him the world. (p. 303)

Death has its own way of embittering victory, and its glory is followed by pestilence. Typhus comes with triumph. (p. 306)

Old age has no hold on the geniuses of the ideal; for the Dantes and the Michelangelos, to grow older is to grow greater; for the Hannibals and the Bonapartes, is it to diminish? (p. 310)

To paint a battle requires those mighty artists with chaos in their brush. (p. 315)

like an aloe tree in Siberia. (p. 362)

He had nothing in his favor except that he was a drunkard. (p. 364)

He smiled habitually as a matter of good business and tried to be polite to everybody, even to the beggar to whom he was refusing a penny. (p. 378)

The three little girls did not have twenty-four years among them, and they already represented the whole of human society: on one side envy, on the other scorn. (p. 402)

She had always been naked under the biting north wind of misfortune, and now it seemed to her she was clothed. Before her soul had been cold; now it was warm. (p. 420)

Children instantly accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being happy and joyful by nature. (p. 435)

As all children do, like the vine's young shoots that cling to everything, she had tried to love. (p. 436)

All those places that we no longer see, which perhaps we shall never see again, but whose image we have preserved, assume a painful charm, return to us with the sadness of a ghost. (p. 447)

All extreme situations have their flashes that sometimes blind us, sometimes illuminate us. (p. 458)

He plainly perceived the truth: from then on she would be the basis of his life, so long as she were there, so long as he had her with him, he would need nothing except her and fear nothing except on her account. He did not even feel cold, even though he had taken off his coat to cover her. (p. 464)

There are moments when hideous possibilities besiege us like a throng of furies and break down the doors of our brain. (p. 466)

He thought himself stronger than he was and believed he could play mouse with a lion. (p. 476)

It was there, too, that these sweet and heartrending words were said by a little foundling whom the convent was rearing through charity. She heard the others talking about their mothers, and in her little nook she whispered, "As for me, my mother wasn't there when I was born." (p. 491)

That eternally returning specter, the past, not infrequently falsifies its passport. Let us be ready for the snare. Let us beware. The past has a face, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy. Let us denounce the face and tear off the mask. (p. 508)

In the light of history, reason, and truth, monastic life stands condemned. (p. 510)

Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms. (p. 514)

The greatness of democracy is that it denies nothing and renounces nothing of humanity. Next to the rights of Man, side by side with them, at least, are the rights of the Soul. (p. 517)

As for methods of prayer, all are good, as long as they are sincere. (p. 518)

Man lives by affirmation even more than he does by bread. (p. 519)

We bow to the man who kneels. A faith is a necessity to man. Woe to him who believes in nothing. A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor. To meditate is to labor; to think is to act. (p. 521)

We are for religion, against the religions. (p. 522)

"People are ignorant of things they ought to know, and know things of which they ought to be ignorant." (p. 540)

Everybody has noticed the way cats stop and loiter in a half-open door. Hasn't everyone said to a cat: For heavens sake why don't you come in? With opportunity half-open in front of them, there are men who have a similar tendency to remain undecided between two solutions, at the risk of being crushed by fate abruptly closing the opportunity. The overprudent, cats as they are, and because they are cats, sometimes run more danger than the bold. (p. 548)

A prince is nothing beside a principle. (p. 551)

Laughter is sunshine; it chases winter from the human face. (p. 569)

So long as man is a child, God wills him to be innocent. (p. 576)

Give a creature the useless, deprive him of the necessary, and you have the gamin. (p. 577)

All the crimes of man begin with the vagrancy of childhood. (p. 582)

A hatred for educating the children of the people was dogma. What good was "a little learning"? (p. 582)

Under Louis XV, children disappeared in Paris; the police carried them off--nobody knew for what mysterious use. With horror, people whispered monstrous conjectures about the king's crimson baths. (p. 583)

In summer, he metamorphoses into a frog; and in the evening, at nightfall, by the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena, from the coal rafts and washerwomen's boats, he plunges headfirst into the Seine, and into total infraction of the laws of modesty and the police. (p. 585)

Sooner or later, the splendid question of universal education will take its position with the irresistible authority of absolute truth. (p. 588)

He was one of those children so deserving of pity above all others, who have fathers and mothers and yet are orphans. (p. 594)

To break all links seems to be the instinct of some wretched families. (p. 596)

They ridiculed the century, which did away with the need to understand it. (p. 621)

What floods ideas are! How quickly they cover all that they are commissioned to destroy and bury, and how rapidly they create frightful abysses! (p. 622)

"Certainly I approve of political opinions, but there are people who do not know where to stop." (p. 629)

We see that like all new converts to a religion, his conversion intoxicated him. (p. 634)

There is a way of falling into error while on the way to truth. (p. 634)

There is nothing like dogma to produce the dream. There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow. (p. 646)

Puns can be serious in politics. (p. 647)

He was not willing for there to be any man on earth without a country. (p. 652)

Sooner or later the submerged country floats to the surface and reappears...You cannot remove the identifying mark from a nation as you can from a handkerchief. (p. 653)

Skepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had not left one entire idea in his mind. (p. 657)

A skeptic adhering to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man. (p. 658)

He looked like a caryatid on vacation; he was supporting nothing but his daydreams. (p. 659)

Leaning back is a way of lying down upright that is not disliked by dreamers. (p. 659)

The turbulent seesawing of all these minds at liberty and at work set his thoughts in a whirl. Sometimes, in the confusion, they roamed so far he had some difficulty finding them again. (p. 663)

"Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious." (pp. 665-666)

"Which do you admire, the slain or the slayer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally people are for the slayer. Hurrah for Brutus! He slew. That's virtue. Virtue, but folly too...The Brutus who slew Caesar was in love with a statue of a little boy. This statue was by the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also designed that statue of an Amazon called the "beautiful limbed," Euknemos, which Nero carried with him on his journeys. This Strongylion left nothing but two statues which put Brutus and Nero in harmony. Brutus was in love with one and Nero with the other." (p. 666)

The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribute, that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. (p. 671)

If Caesar had given me / Glory and war, / And if I must abandon / The love of my mother, / I would say to great Caesar: / Take your scepter and chariot / I love my mother more, alas! / I love my mother more. (p. 674)

He was experiencing what the earth may experience at the moment when it is opened by the plow so wheat may be sown; it feels only the wound; the thrill of the seed and joy of the fruit do not come until later. (p. 675)

Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes. (p. 679)