So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight.
A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.
He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.
For dogs we kings should have lions, and for cats, tigers. The great benefits a crown.
A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.
You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do no bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear.
Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.
It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.
Philosophy should be an energy; it should find its aim and its effect in the amelioration of mankind.
Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.
The essence of higher instrumental music lays herein that one is able to express in tones that what one is unable to say in words.
I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.
There are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.
He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.
In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.
Whatever I thought right, to others seemed wrong; what I held to be bad, others approved of.
I write with one hand, but I fight with both.
The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.
My revenge is fraternity! No more frontiers! The Rhine for everyone! Let us be the same Republic, let us be the United States of Europe, let us be the continental federation, let us be European liberty, let us be universal peace!
The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
It was SHE. Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meaning contained in the three letters of this word ‘she.
Enthusiasm is the fever of reason.
Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.
Reality in strong doses frightens.
His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.
We may remark in passing that to be blind and beloved may, in this world where nothing is perfect, be among the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself; and this assurance the blind man possesses. In his affliction, to be served is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? no. Possessing love he is not deprived of light. A love, moreover, that is wholly pure. There can be no blindness where there is this certainty.
Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.
There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.
If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it's a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.
Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?
Civil war.... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as "foreign war"? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers?
Do you know what friendship is... it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.
A wedding is not house-keeping.
There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.
What is called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, is generally fool's gold.
Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.
A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. There is a person who, departing, took away the sun.
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood... A day will come when we shall see... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas.
Youth is the future smiling at a stranger, which is itself.
Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic.
For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.
Taste is the common sense of genius.
Let us sacrifice one day to gain perhaps a whole life.
The most excellent symbol of the people is the paving stone. One walks on it until it falls on one's head.
No one can keep a secret better than a child.
Human dignity begins to assert itself only at the point where man is distinguishable from the beast by pity for it.
Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision?
Genius is rare because the means of becoming one have not been available
Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?
Who among us has not sought peace in a song?
Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.
