Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament.

So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.

Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus gave way to the lead letters of Gutenburg. The book will kill the edifice.

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.

Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.