Roman author Quotes

“Earnestness is the salt of eloquence.”

“Kings are for nations in their swaddling-clothes: France has attained her majority.”

“In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.”

“The poetic element lying hidden in most women is the source of their magnetic attraction.”

“Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.”

“Desiring always to be in mourning, he clothed himself with night.”

“As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.”

“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.”

“It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.”

“All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.”

“A republic may be called the climate of civilization.”

“No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.”

“If the infinite had no me, then me would be its limit. It would not be the infinite, therefore it would not be.”

“Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.”

“M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.”

“The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!”

“At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette’s dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.”

“A smile is the same as sunshine; it banishes winter from the human countenance.”

“With a tiny bit of effort, the nettle would be useful; if you neglect it, it becomes a pest. So then we kill it. How many men are like nettles My friends, there is no such thing as a weed and no such thing as a bad man. There are only bad cultivators.”

“The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.”

“To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.”

“Reality in strong doses frightens.”

“The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.”

“What happened between those two beings? Nothing. They were adoring one another.”

“Nobody knows like a woman how to say things at the same time sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is all of Heaven.”