Quotes About Contrast

The owl goes not into the nest of the lark.

Among all these passionate hearts and all these undoubting minds there was one skeptic. How did he happen to be there? From juxtaposition. The name of this skeptic was Grantaire, and he usually signed with this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything.

A phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer; that is as simple as the law of the complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man...

What is fright by night is curiosity by day.

These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.

any one who had listened to Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyes in 1817. Only, Courfeyrac was an honourable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyes was very great. The latent man which existed in the two was totally different in the first from what it was in the second. There was in Tholomyes a district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.

There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

Nothing is more charming than the glow of happiness amid squalor. There is a rose-tinted attic in all our lives.

Good thoughts have their abysses as well as evil ones.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

The infinite space that each man carries within himself, wherein despairingly he contrasts the movement of his spirit with the acts of his life, is and overpowering thing.

Bonapartist democrat. Grey shades of a quiet mouse colour.

It combined corrupt simplicity with delicate ferocity, a curious variety of civilization; a tiger with a simper.

It was a garbage heap, and it was Sinai.

Red is an all-embracing colour,' said the bishop. 'How fortunate that those who despise it in a bonnet revere it in a hat.

But what was tragic about the girl was that she had not been born ugly. She might even have been a pretty child, and the grace proper to her age was still at odds with the repulsive premature aging induced by loose living and poverty. A trace of beauty still lingered in the sixteen-year-old face, like pale sunlight fading beneath the massed clouds of a winter's dawn.

A room where one merely goes to bed costs twenty sous but a room where one retires may cost twenty francs.

Le ciel était absolument noir, il n'y avait plus d'étoiles, mais évidemment il en voyait une.

Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as this face, wherein was displayed all that may be designated as the evil of the good.

What matters it if the earth be red! the moon remains white; these are the indifferences of the sky.

In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years of age; Claude Frollo, about thirty-six. One had grown up, the other had grown old.

Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry.

But logic ignores the more-or-less as absolutely as the sun ignores the candlelight.