To contemplate is to look at shadows.

Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls.

Need is a low door which, when we must by stern necessity pass through, forces the greatest to bend down the most.

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

Earnestness is the salt of eloquence.

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.

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.