- Victor Hugo

Man has a body that is both his burden and his temptation. He drags it along and gives into it. He ought to watch over it, keep it in bounds, repress it and obey it only as a last resort. It may be wrong to obey even then, but if so, the fault is venial. It is a fall, but a fall onto the knees, which may end in prayer.

To be a saint is the exception; to be upright is the rule. Err, falter, sin, but be upright.

To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live entirely without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything on this earth is subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.

He had to submit to the fate of every newcomer in a small town, where many tongues talk but few heads think.

Every profession has its aspirants who make up the cortege of those who are at the summit. No power is without its worshipper, no fortune without its court. The seekers of the future revolve around the splendid present.

His universal tenderness was less an instinct of nature than the result of a strong conviction filtered through life into his heart, slowly dropping into him, though by thought; for a character, as well as a rock, may have holes worn into it by drops of water. Such marks are ineffaceable; such formations are indestructible.

She had been preordained to meekness, but faith, charity, hope- the three virtues that gently warm the heart – had gradually elevated this meekness to sanctity.

However that may be, this last offence had a decisive effect upon him. It rushed across the chaos of his intellect and dissipated it, set the light on one side and the dark clouds on the other, and acted on his soul, in the state it was in, as certain chemical reagents act on a murky mixture, by precipitating one element and producing a clean solution on the other.

His brain was in one of those violent, yet frighteningly calm states where reverie is so profound it swallows up reality. We no longer see the object before us, but we see, as if outside of ourselves, the forms we have in our minds.

A faith is a necessity to man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

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

To meditate is to labor; to think is to act.

Folder arms work, clasped hands perform, a gaze fixed on heave work.

In ours eyes, cenobites are not idlers, nor is the recluse a do-thing.

To think of shadows is a serious thing.

To mingle with one’s life a certain awareness of the sepulcher is the law of the wise man and it is the law of the ascetic. In this relation, the ascetic and the sage converge.

There is a material growth; we desire it. There is a also a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.

When a hand is stretched out to pick the flower, the stem quivers, and seems in effect to shrink back and offer itself at the same time. The human body shares something of this trepidation at the moment when the mysterious fingers of death are about to gather in the soul.

One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For the sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse; God stirs up the soul as well as oceans.

Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not experienced that. One could even say that the word is never a more magnificent mystery than when, with a man, it travels from his thought to his conscience and from his conscience to his thought; we say to ourselves, we speak to ourselves, we explain within ourselves, without breaking the external silence, there is a great tumult within; everything within us speaks, except the tongue. The realities of the soul, though not visible and palpable, are nonetheless realities.

Table talk and lovers’ talk are equally elusive; lovers talk in clouds, table talk is smoke.

In the old social order we find a host of institutions like this across our path in the full light of day, with no reason for being there.

It is our conviction that if souls were visible to the eyes we would clearly see the strange fact that each individual of the human species corresponds to some species of the animal kingdom; and we would easily recognize the truth, scarcely perceived by thinkers, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pig to the tiger, all animals are in man, and that each of them is in each man; sometimes even several of them at a time.

Animals are merely the forms of our virtues and vices, wandering before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God shows them to us to make us reflect. Though as animals are merely shadows, God has not made them capable of education in the complete sense of the word. Why should He? On the contrary, our souls being realities with their own particular purpose, God has given them intelligence, that is to say, the possibility of education. A sound social education can always draw out of a soul, whatever it may be, any usefulness it contains.

This is said, of course, from the restricted point of view of apparent earthly life, and without prejudice to the deep question of the anterior or ulterior personality of beings that are not man. The visible ‘me’ in no way authorizes the thinker to deny the hidden ‘me’.

Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.

Let us not carry flame where light alone will suffice.

What is conscience? It is the compass of the unknown thoughts. Meditation, prayer these are the great mysterious directions of the needle.

Philosophy should be energy; it should find its aim and effect in the improvement of mankind.

As for us, postponing the development of our thought to some other occasion, we will merely say that we do not comprehend either man as a starting point or progress as the goal, without the two great driving forces, faith and love.

Progress is the aim, the ideal is the model. What is the ideal? It is God.

Ideal, absolute, perfection, the infinite – these are identical words.

A skeptic adhering to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum major. The toad is always looking at the sky, why? To see the bird fly.

Life is a hideous invention of somebody I don’t know. It doesn’t last and it is good for nothing. You break your neck simply living. Life is a stage set in which there’s little that’s workable. Happiness is an old sash painted on one side. All is vanity.

One glance is enough. When the gun is loaded, and the match is ready, nothing is simpler. A glance is a spark.

The glances of women are like certain seemingly peaceful but really formidable machines. Every day you pass them in peace, with impunity and without suspicion of danger. There comes a moment when you forget even that they are there. You come and go, you meet and talk and laugh. Suddenly you feel caught up; it is all over. The wheels have you, the glance has captured you. It has caught you, no matter how or where, by some wandering of your thought, through a momentary distraction. You are lost. You will be drawn in entirely. A train of mysterious forces has gained possession of you. You struggle in vain. NO human succor is possible. You will be drawn from wheel to wheel, from anguish to anguish, from torture to torture. You, your mind, your fortune, your future, your soul; and you will not leave the awesome machine, until, depending on whether you are in power of a malevolent creature, or a noble hear, you are disfigured by shame or transfigured by love.

God makes his will visible to men in events, an obscure text written in a mysterious language. Men make their translation of it instantly; hasty translation, incorrect, full of mistakes, omissions and misreadings. Very few minds understand the divine language. The wisest and calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly and when they arrive with their text, the need has long since gone by; there are already twenty translations in the public square. From each translation a party is born, and from each misreading a faction; and each party believes it has the only true text, and each faction believes it possess the light.

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories that it has come to be disbelieved. Few people dare say nowadays that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet that is the way love begins, and only that way. Nothing is more real than the great shocks that two souls give each other in exchanging that spark.

Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Facts are one, ideas are the other.

Look closely at life. It is constituted that we feel punishment every where.

Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were trembling for the health of one who is dear to you, today you fear for your own; tomorrow it will be an anxiety about money, the next day the slanders of a calumniator, the day after the misfortune of a friend, then the weather, the something broken or lost, then a pleasure for which you are reproached by your consciences or your vertebral column; another time, the course of public affairs. Not to mention heartaches. And so on. One cloud is dissipated, another gathers. Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small number who are lucky. As for other men, stagnant night is upon them.

Thoughtful minds make little use of this expression. The happy and the unhappy. In this world, clearly the vestibule of another, no one is happy.

The true division of humanity is this: the luminous and the dark.

To diminish the number of the dark, to increase the number of the luminous, there is the aim. That is why we cry: education, knowledge! To learn to read is to kindle a fire; every syllable spelled sparkles.

But whoever says light does not necessarily say joy. There is suffering in the light; an excess burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius.

When you know and when you love you will still suffer. The day dawns in tears. The luminous weep, be it only over the dark ones.

One of the generosities of woman is to yield. Love, at that height where it is absolute, is associated with an inexpressibly celestial blindness of modesty. But what risks you run. O Noble souls! Often, you give the heart, we take the body. Your heart remains to you and you look at it in the darkness; wither it destroys or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorable than love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; coffin too. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all things God has made, the human heart is the one that sheds most light, and, alas! Most night.

It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-sufficient we think it! Being in possession of the false aim of life, happiness, how we forget the true aim, duty!.