Roman author Quotes

“These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.”

“Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.”

“We teachers make the road, others will make the journey.”

“A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?”

“Wisdom and eloquence are not always united.”

“The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.”

“What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.”

“True thinkers are characterized by a blending of clearness and mystery.”

“One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'”

“If you are leaving that sorrowful place with hate and anger against men, you are worthy of compassion; if you leave it with good will, gentleness and peace, you are better than any of us.”

“There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.”

“Enthusiasm is the fever of reason.”

“The persistence of an all-absorbing idea is terrible.”

“Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.”

“There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth.”

“One only needs to see a smile in a white crape bonnet in order to enter the palace of dreams.”

“Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.”

“Not ill? No truly, I am young, healthful, and strong; the blood flows freely in my veins; my limbs obey my will; I am robust in mind and body, constituted for a long life. Yes, all this is true; and yet, nevertheless, I have an illness, a fatal illness,-an illness given by the hand of man!”

“Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.”

“If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes of the old, you see light.”

“Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.”

“Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.”

“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”

“There are things stronger than the strongest man.”

“But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.”