Civilization survives on the constant discovery of amity and an equal supply of damnation.

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 word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

Crime is redeemed by remorse, but not by a blow of the axe or slipknot. Blood has to be washed by tears but not by blood.

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.

Emotion is always new.