The mother...swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood.

Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

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.

Art moves. Hence its civilizing power.

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

Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment.