Emotion is always new and the word has always served; therein lies the difficulty of expressing emotion.

Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates.

Those who always pray are necessary to those who never pray.

Love partakes of the soul itself. it is of the same nature. like it, it is a divine spark, like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable, it is the point of fire which is within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and nothing can extinguish.

He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.

The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being.

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.