He is the best gentleman that is the son of his own deserts, and not the degenerated heir of another's virtue.

To pay compliments to the one we love is the first method of caressing, a demi-audacity venturing. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Conscience is God present in man.

Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.

He sought...to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars.

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