Quotes About Morality

The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow.

For our part, if we were forced to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians.

Have no fear of robbers or murderers. Such dangers are without, and are but petty. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. What matters it what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think only of what threatens our souls.

The just man frowns, but never sneers. We understand anger, not malice.

Sin as little as possible-that is the law of mankind. Not to sin at all is the dream of the angel. All earthly things are subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.

Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact. And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.

To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err, fall, sin if you will, but be upright.

Love is a fault; be it so. Fantine was innocence floating upon the surface of this fault.

He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil. He had that gloomy intersection beneath his eyes. On this occasion once more, as had happened to him already in other sad vicissitudes, two roads opened out before him, the one tempting, the other alarming. Which was he to take?

War has frightful beauties which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideous features. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battle always rises on naked corpses.

One does not cross-examine a saint.

Part 1 A Just Man

No man was created good by God, nor can be made entirely bad by man.

All their teeth are yellow. No tooth-brush ever entered that convent. Brushing one's teeth is at the top of a ladder at whose bottom is the loss of one's soul.

Madame Magloire, retorted the Bishop, you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the useful. He added after a pause, More so, perhaps.

Nous ne sommes pas de ceux qui flattent la guerre; quand l'occasion s'en présente, nous lui disons ses vérités. La guerre a d'affreuses beautés que nous n'avons point cachées; elle a aussi, convenons-en, quelques laideurs. Une des plus surprenantes, c'est le prompt dépouillement des morts après la victoire. L'aube qui suit une bataille se lève toujours sur des cadavres nus.

Those who have succeeded in procuring this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling themselves irresponsible, and of thinking that they can devour everything without uneasiness, — places, sinecures, dignities, power, whether well or ill acquired, lucrative recantations, useful treacheries, savory capitulations of conscience, — and that they shall enter the tomb with their digestion accomplished.

To be wicked does not insure prosperity.

Jean Valjean disconcerted him. All the axioms which had served him as points of support all his life long, had crumbled away in the presence of this man. Jean Valjean's generosity towards him, Javert, crushed him.

One may feel a certain indifference to the death penalty, one may refrain from pronouncing upon it, from saying yes or no, so long as one has not seen a guillotine with one's own eyes: but if one encounters one of them, the shock is violent; one is forced to decide, and to take part for or against. Some

Success; that is the lesson which falls drop by drop from the slope of corruption. Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.

There is one thing sadder than to see one's children die; it is to see them leading an evil life.

I buoni pensieri hanno i loro abissi al pari dei cattivi.

vicdan insan?n içindeki tanr?d?r.