Quotes · verified word for word in the text
Les Misérables quotes
14 quotes from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #135 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces.
— Spoken by a character · IV. WORKS CORRESPONDING TO WORDS
“It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.”
— Spoken by a character · V. A NIGHT BEHIND WHICH THERE IS DAY
The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one’s own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of one’s self; this conviction the blind man possesses.
“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”
— Spoken by a character · XII. THE BISHOP WORKS
“Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man.”
— Spoken by a character · XII. THE BISHOP WORKS
He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often returned with two.
Great perils have this fine characteristic, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
Love is the only ecstasy. All the rest weeps.
To love, or to have loved,—this suffices. Demand nothing more.
Curiosity is a sort of gluttony. To see is to devour.
There is nothing like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams for engendering the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.
What is slang? It is at one and the same time, a nation and a dialect; it is theft in its two kinds; people and language.
70 (return) [ He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.
You ask me what has forced me to speak? a very odd thing; my conscience.
— Spoken by a character · I. THE SEVENTH CIRCLE AND THE EIGHTH HEAVEN
The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets.