FROM THE PAGES OF LES MISÉRABLES

What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do. (page 11)

 

Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched. (page 122)

 

“In the winter, it is so cold that you thresh your arms to warm them; but the bosses won’t allow that; they say it is a waste of time. It is tough work to handle iron when there is ice on the pavements. It wears a man out quick. You get old when you are young at this trade. A man is used up by forty. I was fifty-three.” (page 175)

 

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child. (page 329)

 

The jostlings of young minds against each other have this wonderful attribute, that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What may spring up in a moment? Nobody knows. (page 379)

 

All the problems which the socialists propounded, aside from the cos mogonic visions, dreams, and mysticism, may be reduced to two principal problems. First problem: To produce wealth. Second problem: To distribute it. (page 505)

 

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

(page 505)

 

He did not even know at night what he had done in the morning, nor where he had breakfasted, nor who had spoken to him; he had songs in his ear which rendered him deaf to every other thought; he existed only during the hours in which he saw Cosette. Then, as he was in Heaven, it was quite natural that he should forget the earth. (page 581)

 

Marius felt Cosette living within him. To have Cosette, to possess Cosette, this to him was not separable from breathing. (page 590)

 

The book which the reader has now before his eyes is, from one end to the other, in its whole and in its details, whatever may be the intermissions, the exceptions, or the defaults, the march from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from brutality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; goal: the soul. Hydra at the beginning, angel at the end. (page 698)

 

Without cartridges, without a sword, he had now in his hand only the barrel of his carbine, the stock of which he had broken over the heads of those who were entering. He had put the billiard table between the assailants and himself; he had retreated to the comer of the room, and there, with proud eye, haughty head, and that stump of a weapon in his grasp, he was still so formidable that a large space was left about him.

(page 703)