Quotes About Vulnerability

Both learned that from hardship, a side of people emerged that they had not known. The People had thought themselves to be strong, yet they had been weak. And the two old ones whom they thought to be the most helpless and useless had proven themselves to be strong.

Mornings are fresh like babies, uncontaminated by events. I find them sad for that reason. They're too fragile and naïve.

While we were waiting for the shower, our nakedness was brought home to us: we really had nothing now except our bare bodies—even minus hair; all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence

There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.

She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.

But who among us is perfect? Even the greatest strategists have their eclipses, and the greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, 'That is all there was!' But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.

An army is a strange contrivance in which power is the sum of a vast total of impotence.

Who can be sure that Jean Valjean had not been on the verge of losing heart and giving up the struggle? In loving he recovered his strength. But the truth is that he was no less vulnerable than Cosette. He protected her and she sustained him. Thanks to him she could go forward into life, and thanks to her he could continue virtous. He was the child's support and she his mainstay. Sublime, unfathomable marvel of the balance of destiny!

The shock caused by the fall of a careless word displaces that against which it strikes. At times it happens, without our knowing why, that because we have received an almost imperceptible blow from a chance word, the heart insensibly empties itself of love. He who loves, perceives a decline in his happiness. There is nothing more to be dreaded than this slow exudation from the fissure in the vase.

Women play on their beauty as children play with their knives. And they hurt themselves on it, too.

Kata-kata keras dan pedas menunjukkan alasan yang lemah.

Las mujeres juegan con su belleza como los niños con un cuchillo, y se hieren.

There comes a day when the young girl glances in this manner. Woe to him who chances to be there! That first gaze of a soul which does not, as yet, know itself, is like the dawn in the sky. It

He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.

A hundred francs, thought Fantine. But in what trade can one earn a hundred sous a day? Come! said she, let us sell what is left. The unfortunate girl became a woman of the town.

Errors make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic;

What dangers you run, O noble souls! Often, you give your heart, but we take only your body. Your heart is left to you and you look at it in the shadows and shudder.

To confide is sometime to deliver into a person's power

To love someone is to make them transparent.

The most ferocious creatures are disarmed by caresses bestowed on their young.

Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious, though in an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon. Women play with their beauty as children do with a knife. They wound themselves.

Creyéndose bella, conocía muy bien, aunque de un modo vago, que tenía un arma. Las mujeres juegan con su belleza como los niños con un cuchillo, y se hieren.

In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack

The claw, that's the beast that enters your flesh; the sucker, that's you yourself who enters into the beast. (...) Beyond the terror of being eaten alive is the ineffability of being drunk alive.