Quotes from Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.

The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

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

I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.

You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.

Love is the only future God offers.

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...

If people did not love one another, I really don't see what use there would be in having any spring.

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.

They are les misérables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?

Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.

The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.

This is the shade of difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of the priest should always be open.

The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.

To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth

What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion.

He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.

What a great thing, to be loved! What a greater thing still, to love! The heart becomes heroic though passion…if no one loved, the sun would go out.

If no one loved, the sun would go out.

In love there are no friends everywhere where there is a pretty woman hostility is open.

What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul

Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.

The Bernardo-Benedictines... get up in their first sleep, from one to three A.M., in order to read their breviary and chant matins...

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.