So i tried and failed at completing Les Miserables before leaving Rice. But regardless, here are some quotes that caught my eye.
“I see what it is that scandalizes you. You consider it
great pride for a poor priest to ride an animal which our Saviour once rode. I
did so through necessity, I assure you, and not through vanity.”
“The faults of women, children, servants, the weak, the
indigent, and the ignorant are the fault of husbands, fathers, masters, the
strong, the rich, and the learned.”
“He knew that belief is healthy, and he sought to counsel
and claim the desperate man by pointing out to him the resigned man, and to
transform the grief that gazes at a grave by showing it the grief that looks at
a star.”
“Madame Magloire,” the bishop answered, “you are mistaken;
the beautiful is as useful as the useful.” He added, after a moment’s silence,
“More so, perhaps.”
“He blessed them and they blessed him, and his house was pointed out to anybody
who was in want of anything.”
“Still the sheperd ought not to keep aloof from a scabby
sheep; but, then what a sheep it was!”
“What enlightened this man was his heart and his wisdom was the product of the
light which emanates from it.”
“He probably refrained from going too deep into certain
problems reserved to some extent for great and terrible minds. There is a
sacred horror beneath the portals of the enigma; the gloomy abyss is gaping
before you, but something tells you that you must not enter; woe to the man who
does so. Geniuses, in the profundities of abstraction and pure speculation,
being situated, so to speak, above dogmas, propose their ideas to God; their
prayer audaciously offers a discussion, and their adoration interrogates. This
is direct religion, full of anxiety and responsibility for the man who attempts
to carry the escarpment by storm.”
“An ugly appearance, a deformity of instinct, did not
trouble him or render him indignant; he was moved, almost softened, by them.”
“He also derived from his good deeds that amount of
satisfaction which suffices the conscience, and which whispers to you, “You are
with God.”
“They confound with the constellations of profundity the
stars which the duck’s feet make in the soft mud of the pond.”
“If you leave that mournful place with thoughts of hatred
and anger against your fellow men, you are worthy of pity; if you leave it with
thoughts of kindliness, gentleness, and peace, you are worth more than any of
us.”
“Nature had only made her a lamb, and religion had made her
an angel.”
“All these laws, prejudices, facts, men, and things came and
went above him, in accordance with the complicated and mysterious movement,
which God imprints on civilization, marching over him, and crushing him with
something painful in its cruelty, and inexorable in its indifference. Souls
which have fallen into the abyss of possible misfortune, hapless men lost in
the depths of those limbos into which people no longer look, and the reprobates
of the law feel on their heads the whole weight of the human society, so
formidable for those outside it, so terrific for those beneath it.”
“Morality is truth in bloom; to contemplate leads to action,
the absolute ought to be practical; the ideal must be what the soul can eat,
drink, and breathe.”
“Youth, combined with gentleness, produces on aged people
the effect of sun without wind.”
“Assuredly, if the language which a nation or a province has
spoken is worthy of interest, there is a thing still more worthy of attention
and study, and that is the language which a wretchedness has spoken.”
And the last I read before leaving: (and one of my favorites)
“The power of a glance has been so abused in love romances
that is has been discredited in the end, and a writer dares hardly assert
nowadays that two beings fell in love because they looked at each other. And
yet that is the way, and the sole way, in which people fall in love; the rest
is merely the rest, and comes afterward. Nothing is more real than the mighty
shocks which two souls give each other by exchanging this spark.”
