Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.

One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.

The poetic element lying hidden in most women is the source of their magnetic attraction.

What is called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, is generally fool's gold.

His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.

There are souls which, crab-like, crawl continually toward darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it, using what experience they have to increase their deformity, growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness.

Dying is nothing. What's terrible is not to live.