It is often our best friends who throw us down.

Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.

God has bestowed two gifts on man: hope and ignorance. Ignorance is the better of the two.

To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!

M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.

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.

There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the priest.