All Quotes

"Let us not fall into the vulgar error, which is to curse and to dishonour the age in which we live. However deep the shame of the present, whatever blows we receive from the fluctuation of events, whatever the apparent desertion or the momentary lethargy of mental vigour, none of us... will repudiate the magnificent epoch in which we live, the virile age of mankind. Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"For four hundred years the human race has not made a step but what has left its plain vestige behind. We enter now upon great centuries. The sixteenth century will be known as the age of painters, the seventeenth will be termed the age of writers, the eighteenth the age of philosophers, the nineteenth the age of apostles and prophets. To satisfy the nineteenth century, it is necessary to be the painter of the sixteenth, the writer of the seventeenth, the philosopher of the eighteenth; and it is also necessary, like Louis Blane, to have the innate and holy love of humanity which constitutes an apostolate, and opens up a prophetic vista into the future. In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, animosity will be dead, royalty will be dead, and dogmas will be dead; but Man will live. For all there will be but one country—that country the whole earth; for all there will be but one hope—that hope the whole heaven."

"Was it possible that Napoleon should win the battle of Waterloo? We answer, No! Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No! Because of God! For Bonaparte to conquer at Waterloo was not the law of the nineteenth century. It was time that this vast man should fall. He had been impeached before the Infinite! He had vexed God! Waterloo was not a battle. It was the change of front of the Universe!"

"Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots."

"C'est ici le combat du jour et de la nuit... Je vois de la lumière noire."

"There shall be no slavery of the mind."

"Lever à six, coucher à dix, Dîner à dix, souper à six, Font vivre l'homme dix fois dix."

"Ce besoin de l’immatériel est le plus vivace de tous. Il faut du pain; mais avant le pain, il faut l’idéal."

"Je représente un parti qui n'existe pas encore, le parti Révolution-Civilisation. Ce parti fera le vingtième siècle. Il en sortira d'abord les États-Unis d'Europe, puis les États-Unis du Monde."

"To divinise is human, to humanise is divine."

"Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it."

"Les Misérables"

"Aimer, c'est agir"

"Oriental studies have never been so intensive.... In the century of Louis XIV one was a Hellenist, today one is an Orientalist.... The Orient has become a sort of general preoccupation.... We shall see great things. The old Asiatic barbarism may not be as devoid of higher men as our civilization would like to believe."

"À quelle heure, s'il vous plaît?"

"Vous avez des ennemis? Mais c'est l'histoire de tout homme qui a fait une action grande ou crée une idée neuve. C'est la nuée qui bruit autour de tout ce qui brille. Il faut que la renommé ait des ennemis comme il faut que la lumière ait des moucherons. Ne vous en inquiétez pas, dédaignez! Ayez la sérénité dans votre esprit comme vous avez la limpidité dans votre vie."

"It is time, we repeat, that this monstrous slumber of men's consciences should end. It must not be, after that fearful scandal, the triumph of crime, that a scandal still more fearful should be presented to mankind: the indifference of the civilized world. Book I, III"

"At certain epochs of history, there are pleiades of great men; at other epochs, there are pleiades of vagabonds. But do not confound the epoch, the moment of Louis Bonaparte, with the 19th century: the toadstool sprouts at the foot of the oak, but it is not the oak. Book I, VI"

"At certain epochs in history, the whole human race, from all points of the earth, fix their eyes upon some mysterious spot whence it seems that universal destiny is about to issue. Book I, VI"

"Alas! of what is France thinking? Of a surety, we must awake this slumbering nation, we must take it by the arm, we must shake it, we must speak to it; we must scour the fields, enter the villages, go into the barracks, speak to the soldier who no longer knows what he is doing, speak to the labourer who has in his cabin an engraving of the Emperor, and who, for that reason, votes for everything they ask; we must remove the radiant phantom that dazzles their eyes; this whole situation is nothing but a huge and deadly joke. Book I, VI"

"Let us sum up this government! Who is at the Élysée and the Tuileries? Crime. Who is established at the Luxembourg? Baseness. Who at the Palais Bourbon? Imbecility. Who at the Palais d'Orsay?...And who are in the prisons... in the dungeons...in exile? Law, honour, intelligence, liberty, and the right. Book I, VI"

"The present government is a hand stained with blood, which dips a finger in the holy water. Book II, X"

"We who combat them are "the eternal enemies of order." We are—for they can as yet find nothing but this worn-out word—we are demagogues. In the language of the Duke of Alva, to believe in the sacredness of the human conscience, to resist the Inquisition, to brave the state for one's faith, to draw the sword for one's country, to defend one's worship, one's city, one's home, one's house, one's family, and one's God, was called vagabondism... The man is a demagogue in the nineteenth century, who in the sixteenth would have been a vagabond. Book II, XI"

"They had done him the honor to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet."

"It is very fortunate that kings cannot err. Hence their contradictions never perplex us."

"This tribune was the terror of every tyranny and fanaticism, it was the hope of every one who was oppressed under Heaven. Whoever placed his foot upon that height, felt distinctly the pulsations of the great heart of mankind. There, providing he was a man of earnest purpose, his soul swelled within him, and shone without. A breath of universal philanthropy seized him, and filled his mind as the breeze fills the sail; so long as his feet rested upon those four planks, he was a stronger and a better man; he felt at that consecrated minute as if he were living the life of all the nations; words of charity for all men came to his lips; beyond the Assembly, grouped at his feet, and frequently in a tumult, he beheld the people, attentive, serious, with ears strained, and fingers on lips; and beyond the people, the human race, plunged in thought, seated in circles, and listening. Book V, V"

"From this tribune, incessantly vibrating, gushed forth perpetually a sort of sonorous flood, a mighty oscillation of sentiments and ideas, which, from billow to billow, and from people to people, flowed to the utmost confines of the earth, to set in motion those intelligent waves which are called souls. Book V, V"

"Two great problems hang over the world. War must disappear, and conquest must continue. These two necessities of a growing civilization seemed to exclude each other. How satisfy the one without failing the other? Book V, VII"

"Now it is all over. The great work is accomplished. And the results of the work!...Get all you can, gorge yourselves, grow a fat paunch; it is no longer a question of being a great people, of being a powerful people, of being a free nation, of casting a bright light; France no longer sees its way to that. Book V, IX"

"Now there is no more noise, no more confusion, no more talking, no more parliament, or parliamentarism. The Corps Législatif, the Senate, the Council of State, have all had their mouths sewn up. Book V, IX"

"Be proud, Frenchmen! Lift high your heads, Frenchmen! You are no longer anything, and this man is everything! He holds in his hand your intelligence, as a child holds a bird. Any day he pleases, he can strangle the genius of France. Book V, IX"

"The orator resumes: "And if it should happen some day that a man, having in his hand the five hundred thousand officeholders who constitute the government, and the four hundred thousand soldiers composing the army, if it should happen that this man should tear up the Constitution, should violate every law, break every oath, trample upon every right, commit every crime, do you know what your irremovable magistrates, instructors in the right, and guardians of the law, would do? They would hold their tongues." Book VIII, IV"

"From every agglomeration of men, from every city, from every nation, there inevitably arises a collective force. Place this collective force at the service of liberty, let it rule by universal suffrage, the city becomes a commune, the nation becomes a republic. This collective force is not, of its nature, intelligent. Belonging to all, it belongs to no one; it floats about, so to speak, outside of the people. Conclusion, Part First, II"

"There is... always, in a large population like that of France, a class which is ignorant, which suffers, covets, and struggles, placed between the brutish instinct which impels it to take, and the moral law which invites it to labour. In the grievous and oppressed condition in which it still is, this class, in order to maintain itself in probity and well-doing, requires all the pure and holy light that emanates from the Gospel; it requires that, on the one hand, the spirit of Jesus Christ, and, on the other, the spirit of the French Revolution, should address to it the same manly words, and should never cease to point out to it, as the only lights worthy of the eyes of man, the exalted and mysterious laws of human destiny,—self-denial, devotion, sacrifice, the labour which leads to material well-being, the probity which leads to inward well-being; even with this perennial instruction, at once divine and human, this class, so worthy of sympathy and fraternity, often succumbs. Conclusion, Part First, III"

"On the day when the human conscience shall lose its bearings, on the day when success shall carry the day before that forum, all will be at an end. The last moral gleam will reascend to heaven. Darkness will be in the mind of man. You will have nothing to do but to devour one another, wild beasts that you are! Conclusion, Part First, III"

"With moral degradation goes political degradation. Conclusion, Part First, III"

"They determined, once for all, to make an end of the spirit of freedom and emancipation, and to drive back and repress for ever the upward tendency of mankind. To undo the labour of twenty generations; to kill in the nineteenth century, by strangulation... Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire, religious scrutiny, philosophical scrutiny, universal scrutiny; to crush throughout all Europe this immense vegetation of free thought, here a tender blade, there a sturdy oak; ...to resuscitate all they could of the Inquisition, and to stifle all they could of intelligence; to stultify youth, in other words to brutalize the future;... to say to nations: "Eat and think no more;".... Conclusion, Part Second, I"

"There was a nation among the nations, which was a sort of elder brother in this family of the oppressed, a prophet in the human tribe. This nation took the initiative of the whole human movement. It went on, saying, "Come!" and the rest followed. As a complement to the fraternity of men, in the Gospel, it taught the fraternity of nations. It spoke by the voice of its writers, of its poets, of its philosophers, of its orators, as by a single mouth, and its words flew to the extremities of the earth, to rest, like tongues of fire, upon the brow of all nations. It presided over the communion of intellects. Conclusion, Part Second, I"

"Now it is all over. The French nation is dead. Conclusion, Part Second, I"

"Let us have faith. No, let us not be cast down. To despair is to desert. Let us look to the future. The future,—no one knows what tempests still separate us from port, but the port, the distant and radiant port, is in sight; the future, we repeat, is the republic for all men; let us add, the future is peace with all men. Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"Let us proclaim it aloud, let us proclaim it in our fall and in our defeat, this is the greatest of all ages! and do you know the reason why? because it is the mildest. This age, the immediate issue, the firstborn offspring, of the French Revolution, frees the slave in America, raises from his degradation the pariah in Asia, abolishes the suttee in India, and extinguishes in Europe the last brands of the stake, civilizes Turkey, carries the Gospel into the domain of the Koran, dignifies woman, subordinates the right of the strongest to that of the most just, suppresses pirates, mitigates sentences, makes the galleys healthy, throws the red-hot iron into the sewer, condemns the penalty of death, removes the ball and chain from the leg of the convict, abolishes torture, degrades and brands war, stifles Dukes of Alva and Charles the Ninths, and extracts the claws of tyrants. Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"This age proclaims the sovereignty of the citizen, and the inviolability of life; it crowns the people, and consecrates man. In art, it possesses all varieties of genius,—writers, orators, poets, historians, publicists, philosophers, painters, sculptors, musicians; majesty, grace, power, force, splendour, colour, form, style; it renews its strength in the real and in the ideal, and bears in its hand the two thunderbolts, the true and the beautiful. In science it accomplishes unheard-of miracles; it makes of cotton salt petre, of steam a horse, of the voltaic battery a workman, of the electric fluid a messenger, of the sun a painter; it waters itself with subterranean streams, pending the time when it shall warm itself with the central fire; it opens upon the two infinites those two windows, the telescope upon the infinitely great, the microscope upon the infinitely little, and it finds stars in the first abyss, and insects in the second, which prove to it the existence of God... It annihilates time, it annihilates space, it annihilates suffering; it writes a letter from Paris to London, and has an answer in ten minutes; it cuts off a man's leg, the man sings and smiles. Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"This was the work that the nineteenth century had done among men, and was continuing in glorious, fashion to do,—that century of sterility, that century of domination, that century of decadence, that century of degradation, as it is called by the pedants, the rhetoricians, the imbeciles, and all that filthy brood of bigots, of knaves, and of sharpers, who sanctimoniously slaver gall upon glory, who assert that Pascal was a madman, Voltaire a coxcomb, and Rousseau a brute, and whose triumph it would be to put a fool's-cap upon the human race. Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"O my country! it is at this moment, when I see you bleeding, inanimate, your head hanging, your eyes closed, your mouth open, and no words issuing therefrom, the marks of the whip upon your shoulders, the nails of the executioner's shoes imprinted upon your body, naked and ashamed, and like a thing deprived of life, an object of hatred, of derision, alas! it is at this moment, my country, that the heart of the exile overflows with love and respect for you! Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"Vous avez raison, monsieur, quand vous me dites que le livre les Misérables est écrit pour tous les peuples. Je ne sais s'il sera lu par tous, mais je l'ai écrit pour tous. Il s'adresse à l'Angleterre autant qu'à l'Espagne, à l'Italie autant qu'à la France, à l'Allemagne autant qu'à l'Irlande, aux républiques qui ont des esclaves aussi bien qu'aux empires qui ont des serfs. Les problèmes sociaux dépassent les frontières. Les plaies du genre humain, ces larges plaies qui couvrent le globe, ne s'arrêtent point aux lignes bleues ou rouges tracées sur la mappemonde. Partout où l'homme ignore et désespère, partout où la femme se vend pour du pain, partout où l'enfant souffre faute d'un livre qui l'enseigne et d'un foyer qui le réchauffe, le livre les Misérables frappe à la porte et dit: Ouvrez-moi, je viens pour vous."

"À l'heure, si sombre encore, de la civilisation où nous sommes, le misérable s'appelle L'HOMME; il agonise sous tous les climats, et il gémit dans toutes les langues."

"Du fond de l'ombre où nous sommes et où vous êtes, vous ne voyez pas beaucoup plus distinctement que nous les radieuses et lointaines portes de l'éden. Seulement les prêtres se trompent. Ces portes saintes ne sont pas derrière nous, mais devant nous."

"Ce livre, les Misérables, n'est pas moins que votre miroir que le nôtre. Certains hommes, certaines castes, se révoltent contre ce livre, je le comprends. Les miroirs, ces diseurs de vérité, sont haïs; cela ne les empêche pas d'être utiles. Quant à moi, j'ai écrit pour tous, avec un profond amour pour mon pays, mais sans me préoccuper de la France plus que d'un autre peuple. A mesure que j'avance dans la vie je me simplifie, et je deviens de plus en plus patriote de l'humanité."

"En somme, je fais ce que je peux, je souffre de la souffrance universelle, et je tâche de la soulager, je n'ai que les chétives forces d'un homme, et je crie à tous: aidez-moi."

"Italiens ou français, la misère nous regarde tous. Depuis que l'histoire écrit et que la philosophie médite, la misère est le vêtement du genre humain; le moment serait enfin venu d'arracher cette guenille, et de remplacer, sur les membres nus de l'Homme-Peuple, la loque sinistre du passé par la grande robe pourpre de l'aurore."