Julia Higgins’s Reviews > Les Misérables > Status Update

can you be too much alive? Can you be too happy? Moderate your joys. Oh, balderdash! Down with the philosophers! Wisdom is jubilation. Jubilate, jubilate. Are we happy because we are good, or are we good because we are happy?

The penetration of a torturing certainty within man does not occur without breaking up and pulverizing certain deep elements that are sometimes the man himself. Grief, when it reaches this level, is a panic of all the forces of consciousness. These are fatal crises.

...bullets kill people in their beds, corpses litter the pavement. A few streets away, you hear the clicking of billiard balls in the cafes. The theaters open their doors and play comedies; the curious chat and laugh two steps from these streets full of war.

Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorably than love.

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.

...the prisoners crouched, a hideous obedience was produced by the torture, and all fell silent with the look of chained wolves. Cosette trembled all over; she asked, 'Father, are they still men?'
'Sometimes,' said the man of misery.

'And the world will let you die and fall, because the world lets everything fall and die that is nothing but selfishness, everything that does not represent a virtue or an idea for the human race.'

'Revolutions spring, not from an accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It is, because it must be.'

"The social masses, the very foundation of civilization, the consolidated group of superimposed and cohering interests, the venerable profile of old France, constantly appear and disappear through the stormy clouds of systems, passions, and theories...occasionally, we see a gleam of truth, that daylight of the human soul."

"The descending ladder is a strange one; each of its rungs corresponds to a step where philosophy can set foot, and where we discover one of her workers, sometimes divine, sometimes monstrous."