Quotes from Les Miserables
Quotes from Les Miserables

…the goodness of the mother is written in the gaiety of the child.
So that’s the reason….just kidding. I love you mom. Les Miserables p.51

Curiousity is gluttony. To see is to devour.
Hmmm…I’m hungry. Les Miserables

To write the poem of the human conscience, if only of one man, even the most insignifigant man, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and definitive epic.
No wonder this book is so long. Les Miserables p.220

This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divining quality that…often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance…Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.
Kind of makes you think twice about what you do doesn’t it? Les Miserables p.313

There are moments in battle when the soul hardens a man to the point of changing the soldier into a statue, all flesh turning to granite.
I commend guys who go to battle, you’d never see me there. Les Miserables p.330

If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is call it Tomorrow.
Well I’m just about out of smart remarks and you’re probably getting tired of them too so I’ll only speak up now if I really feel the need to. I really like this quote. Les Miserables p.349

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering, a hell of boredom.
To those of us who went to NK that hell is CPE with Mr. Malfait. Les Miserables p.432

If the two infinites are intelligent, each one of them has a principle of will, and there is a “me” in the infinite above as there is a “me” in the infinite below. The “me” below is the soul; the “me” above is God.
Les Miserables p.517

To say, “The plant wills,” instead of “The plant grows,” would be pregnant with meaning…Why? Because this would flow from it: the plant wills, so it has a “me”; the universe wills, so it has a God.
Les Miserables Bk.7, Ch.6, p.518

Morality is truth in full bloom.
Les Miserables p.519

To meditate is to labor; to think is to act.
Les Miserables Cossette Bk.7, Ch.8, p.521

So long as man is a child, God wills him to be innocent.
Les Miserables Marius Bk.1, Ch.1, p.576

They longed for the absolute, they glimpsed the infinite realizations; by its very rigidity, the absolute pushes the mind toward towards the boundless and sets it afloat in the limitless…There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
Les Miserables Marius Bk.4, Ch.1, p.646

To err is human, to loaf is Parisian.
Les Miserables Marius Bk.4, Ch.1, p.654

As with all good hearts, suffering had taken away his bitterness.
Les Miserables Marius Bk.5, Ch.1, p.684

Hey! There’s a pinto in my olive!
I think this is my first original quote on this page. Stop laughing, you know what I meant. 8/17/98

Poverty in youth, when it succeeds is magnificent in that it turns the whole will towards effort and the whole soul toward aspiration. Poverty strips the material life entirely bare and makes it hideous: from this arise inexpressible yearnings toward the ideal life…The poor young man must work for his bread; he eats; when he has eaten he has nothing left but reverie…he, a millionaire of intelligence, comes to grieve for the millionaires of money…and he blesses God for having given him the two gifts that many of the wealthy lacks: labor, which makes him free, and thought, which makes him noble.
Les Miserables Marius Bk.5, Ch.3, p.685-686

[Defining the human soul] Our capacity for individuality.
Dark City

There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream.
Les Miserables Marius Bk. 5, Ch.1, p.693

Freedom is never having to say you’re sorry.
The Devil’s Advocate

Beneath society there is , we insist, and until the day when ignorance disappears, the great cavern of evil.
Les Miserables Marius Bk.7, Ch.2, p.721

Never among animals does the creature born to be a dove change into an osprey. That is only seen among men.
Les Miserables Marius Bk.8, Ch.4, p.739

From these two things combined, public power and individual happiness, social prosperity results. Social prosperity means happy men, the citizens free, the nation great.
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.1, Ch.4, p.846

A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills the gaps and intervals here and there binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Woe to the intellectual who lets himself fall completely from thought in reverie.
Les Miserables St. Denis, Bk.2, Ch.1, p.861

[About Communism] to kill wealth is not to distribute it.
Les Miserables St. Denis, Bk.1, Ch.4, p.841

Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the hearts of men in this double light, has seen nothing and knows nothing of the truth.
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.2, Ch.1, p.863

Yet that is the way love begins, and is the only way. The rest is and only the rest and comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than the great shocks that two souls give each other in exchanging this spark.
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.2, Ch.6, p.896

Youth, even in its sorrows, always has a glimmer all its own.
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.2, Ch.8, p.904

…winter always carries with it something of our sadness…
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.4, Ch.1, p.915

…the peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our night terrors, and our laughter is always proportioned to the fear we have had…
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.5, Ch.3, p.931

The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being into God, this is love. Love is the salutation of the angel to the stars.
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.5, Ch.4, p.932

God…had…clearly made creation for the soul, and the soul for love!…God is behind everything, but everything hides God…To love a human being is to make her transparent…All of God’s works were made to serve love. Love is powerful enough to change all nature with its messages…The future belongs still more to the heart than the mind. To love is the only thing that can occupy and fill up eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible. Love partakes of the soul itself…Like the soul, it is a divine spark; it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable.
Les Miserables St. Denis, Bk.5, Ch.4, p.932

God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the plenitude of man.
Les Miserables p.933

To die for lack of love is horrible. The asphyxia of the soul.
Les Miserables p.933

When love has dissolved and mingled two beings in an angelic sacred unity, the secret of life is found for them: they are then but the two terms of a single destiny; they are then but the two wings of a single spirit. Love, soar!
Les Miserables p.933

Deep hearts, wise minds take life as God has made it; it is a long and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.
Les Miserables p.934

If no one loved, the sun would go out.
Les Miserables p.935

But those who do not want the future should think it over. In saying no to progress, it is not the future that they condemn, but themselves. They are giving themselves a melancholy disease; they are inoculating themselves with the past. There is only one way of refusing tomorrow, and that is to die.
Now, no death – that of the body as late as possible, never that of the soul – is what we desire.
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.7, Ch.4, p.1000

Love is a burning forgetfulness of everything else.
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.8, Ch.2, p.1009

When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.
I just need to tell everyone back in Poulsbo, don’t worry, I’m still very much alive. Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.8, Ch.2, p.1022

Is there any foreign war? Isn’t every war fought between men, between bothers? War is modified only by its aim. There’s neither foreign war nor civil war; there’s only unjust war and just war.
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.13, Ch.3, p.1176

The soul does not give up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.15, Ch.1, p.1152

Alas, the supreme ordeal, or let us say instead, the only ordeal is the loss of the beloved being.
Les Miserables St. Denis Bk.15, Ch.1, p.1153

He who does not weep does not see. We should admire and pity them, as we would pity and admire a being at once light and darkness, with no eyes under his brows and a star in the middle of his forehead.
Les Miserables Jean Valjean Bk1, Ch.16, p.1220

A great city is the most powerful of dung, producers.
Can you tell I don’t like cities? Les Miserables Jean Valjean Bk.2, Ch.1, p.1256

It rained that day, but there is always a little patch of blue in the sky of happiness, which lovers see, even though the rest of creation may be under an umbrella
Les Miserables Jean Valjean Bk.6, Ch.1, p.1368

Are we happy because we are good, or are we good because we are happy?
A little from column A, a little from column B. Les Miserables Jean Valjean Bk.6, Ch.2, p.1378

It is not enough to be happy, we must be satisfied with ourselves.
Les Miserables Jean Valjean Bk7, Ch.1, p.1346

It is nothing to die, it is horrible not to live.
Or there’s what William Wallace says…no I’m not going to repeat it, it was shouted repeadtly when Braveheart came out. Les Miserables Jean Valjean Bk.9, Ch.5, p.1458

To love another person is to see the face of God.
I’m not 100% sure how they got this from the book but it’s from Les Miserables the musical.

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