Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.

Inanimate objects sometimes appear endowed with a strange power of sight. A statue notices, a tower watches, the face of an edifice contemplates.

It was SHE. Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meaning contained in the three letters of this word ‘she.

The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

To destroy abuses is not enough; Habits must also be changed. The windmill has gone, but the wind is still there." ~old man G--- to Monseigneur Bienvenu Myriel