What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. God, having made the mouse, said, 'I've made a blunder.' And he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, Is the revised and corrected proof of creation.

Joie est mon caractere, C'est la faute a Voltaire; Misere est mon trousseau C'est la faute a Rousseau. [Joy is my character, 'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Misery is my trousseau 'Tis the fault of Rousseau.] - Gavroche

To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.

The mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling or more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.

The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests upon anything but what is elevated and great.

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

Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.