Deep hearts, wise minds take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to discern the definite. The definite, think about this word. The living see the infinite; the

The future belongs still more to the heart than the mind. To love is the only thing that can occupy and fill up eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible.

To amuse herself, she had opened her piano and began to sing, playing an accompaniment, the chorus from Euryanthe, “Hunters wandering in the woods!” perhaps the most beautiful piece of music ever written.

To do nothing, that’s your aim. Well, not a week, not a day, not an hour, without crushing exhaustion. You won’t be able to lift a thing except with anguish. Every minute that elapses will make your muscles crack. What will be a feather for others will be a rock for you. The simplest things will become steep. Life will become a monster around you.

In learning that she was beautiful, Cosette lost the grace of not knowing it; an exquisite grace, for beauty heightened by artlessness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as dazzling innocence, going about her business and holding in her hand, quite unconsciously, the key to a paradise. But what she lost in ingenuous grace, she gained in

When she was dozing at night, before going to sleep, since she had no very clear idea of being Jean Valjean’s daughter, and that he was her father, she imagined that her mother’s soul had passed into this good man and come to live with her. When he sat down, she would rest her cheek on his white hair and silently drop a tear, saying to herself,

There is nothing like a convent to prepare a young girl for passions. The convent turns her thoughts in the direction of the unknown. Her heart, thrown back on itself, makes itself a channel, being unable to overflow, and deepens, being unable to expand. Thence visions, suppositions, conjectures, romances sketched out, longings for adventures,

The soul of a young girl should not be left in obscurity; in later life, all too sudden and vivid mirages spring up, as in a camera oscura. She should be gently and discreetly enlightened, rather by the reflection of realities than by their direct harsh light. A useful and graciously severe half-light that dissipates puerile fear and prevents a

Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits the rose; no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb