A library implies an act of faith.

Nothing is more dangerous than to stop working. It is a habit that can soon be lost, one that is easily neglected and hard to resume. A measure of day-dreaming is a good thing, like a drug prudently used ... But too much submerges and drowns. Woe to the intellectual worker who allows himself to lapse wholly from positive thinking into day-dreaming. He thinks he can easily change back, and tells himself that it is all one. He is wrong! To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse poison with a source of nourishment.

God is behind everything, but everything hides God.

The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.

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.

When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.

It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.