In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there is something of everything; there is bravery, youth, honor, enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the eager fury of the gamester, and above all, intervals of hope.
— Les Misérables
Victor Hugo was a French Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, human rights activist and politician. His most famous works are the novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables, and in France he is also renowned for poetry collections such as Les Contemplations.
He was at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and his drama Hernani. He produced more than 4,000 drawings and campaigned for the abolition of capital punishment and slavery. A royalist in his youth, he became a passionate supporter of republicanism and served as both deputy and senator. When he died in 1885, his state funeral in the Panthéon was attended by over two million people. Les Misérables is his most quoted work in our library.
He was at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and his drama Hernani. He produced more than 4,000 drawings and campaigned for the abolition of capital punishment and slavery. A royalist in his youth, he became a passionate supporter of republicanism and served as both deputy and senator. When he died in 1885, his state funeral in the Panthéon was attended by over two million people. Les Misérables is his most quoted work in our library.
A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.
— Les Misérables
We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.
— Les Misérables
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.
— Les Misérables
Death belongs only to God. What right have men to lay hands on a thing so unknown?
— Les Misérables
The judge speaks in the name of justice,' he said. 'The priest speaks in the name of pity, which is only a higher form of justice.'
— Les Misérables
This is the shade of difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of the priest should always be open.
— Les Misérables
What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant...
— Les Misérables
The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
— The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
What makes night within us may leave stars.
— Ninety-Three
The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.
— Les Misérables
He had to accept the fate of every newcomer to a small town where there are plenty of tongues that gossip and few minds that think.
— Les Misérables
Teach the ignorant as much as you can. Society is to blame for not giving free education: it is responsible for the darkness it creates. the soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness
— Les Misérables
The goodness of the mother is written in the gaiety of the child.
— Les Misérables
Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.
— Les Misérables
He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.
— Les Misérables
I have a dream my life would be. So different from this hell I'm living. So different now from what it seem. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed."*Fantine
— Les Misérables
. . .where there is no more hope, song remains.
— Les Misérables
To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further, There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.
— Les Misérables
First of all, I wish you love, and that by loving you may also be loved. But if it’s not like that, be brief in forgetting / And after you’ve forgotten, don’t keep anything.
Forty is the old age of youth fifty is the youth of old age.