The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, That is all there was! But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.

Whom man kills, him God restoreth to life.

Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.

Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.

Love is the salutation of the angel to the stars

The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple.

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