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, books of the nature of this one cannot fail to be of use.
Jean Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from black thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.
She had sold her hair; she had sold her teeth. What did she sell next? She sold herself. Christ had made himself a beggar for the sake of men; she had made herself a thing that men could buy for the sake of her child.
The child gazed at the marvellous doll with a sort of dazzled terror. To possess this doll was happiness, and she did not even dream of it. She had never had a doll, and she was afraid to look at it too long.
He had entered the service of the authorities as one enters a religion. He was a spy as others are priests. Woe to the man who fell into his hands! He would have arrested his own father escaping from prison.
Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers, which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is slime, minus the human form.
He was one of those children most deserving of pity who have father and mother, and yet are orphans. This child never felt so happy as when he was in the street. The pavement was less hard to him than his mother's heart.
He beheld before him two roads, both equally straight; but he beheld two of them, and that terrified him, for he had never in his life known more than one straight line. And these two roads were contradictory.
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
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.