Quote collection
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"If he had had all Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have given it to this dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru in his pocket; and besides, America was not yet discovered. (p. 66)"
"There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime."
"Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates."
"While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.' No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday."
"One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will."
"There are souls which, crab-like, crawl continually toward darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it, using what experience they have to increase their deformity, growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness."
"There are many lovely women, but no perfect ones."
"God has bestowed two gifts on man: hope and ignorance. Ignorance is the better of the two."
"God put in man thought; society, action; nature, revery."
"There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God."
"Whom man kills, him God restoreth to life."
"What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. God, having made the mouse, said, 'I've made a blunder.' And he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, Is the revised and corrected proof of creation."
"There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers."
"Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God."
"Too much improvisation leaves the mind stupidly void."
"The mother...swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood."
"We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve."
"Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection."
"Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions."
"...there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables"