To love beauty is to see light.

What says the law? You will not kill. How does it say it? By killing!

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.

Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it." She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:-- "And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.

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.