Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.

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.

The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being.

Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

To be wicked does not insure prosperity - for the inn did not succeed well.

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom.

God has set his intentions in the flowers, in the dawn, in the spring, it is his will that we should love.