The rich's paradise was created by the poor's hell.

To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.

Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

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.

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

There shall be no slavery of the mind.