Quotes from Les Misérables

Quotations follow the Christine Donougher translation (Penguin Classics, 2013) — our recommended edition.

1. 2

   Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.

2. 3

   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.

3. 4

   It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.

4. 5

   Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man.

5. 6

   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.

6. 7

   So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world; in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.

7. 8

   There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.

8. 9

   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.

9. 10

   There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

10. 11

    Laughter is sunshine; it chases winter from the human face.

11. 12

    Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

12. 13

    The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow.

13. 14

    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.

14. 15

    He never went out without a book, and he often came back with two.

15. 16

    Marius had already seen too much of life not to know that nothing is more imminent than the impossible, and that what it is always necessary to foresee is the unforeseen.

16. 17

    A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.