Great Throughts Treasury

"What matters deafness of the ears when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind."

"What men order, things disorder."

"What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain."

"What you fellows call progress moves by two motors, men and events. But sad to say, from time to time the exceptional is necessary. For events as well as men, the stock company is not enough...seeing a comet, one would be tempted to believe that Heaven itself is in need of star actors."

"When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind."

"When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door."

"When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes."

"When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right."

"When events, which are variable, ask us a question, justice, which is immutable, calls on us to answer."

"When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide."

"When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age."

"When liberty returns, I will return."

"When man has touched wood or stone, it is no longer wood or stone, but takes on something of man. An edifice is a dogma, a machine is an idea."

"When one enjoys full liberty, one must use it with the utmost moderation."

"When the attention becomes fixed, it is like a light."

"When they saw him making money, they said He is a merchant. When they saw the way in which he scattered his money, they said, He is ambitious. When they saw him refuse honors, they said, He is an adventurer. When they saw him repel the advances of the fashionable, they said, He is a brute."

"When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything."

"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old."

"Whenever we encounter the Infinite in man, however imperfectly understood, we treat it with respect. Whether in the synagogue, the mosque, the pagoda, or the wigwam, there is a hideous aspect which we execrate and a sublime aspect which we venerate . So great a subject for spiritual contemplation, such measureless dreaming -- the echo of God on the human wall!"

"Where genius rises, envy raises her head."

"Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign."

"Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?"

"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?"

"Where there is thought, there is power."

"Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows."

"Whether this young girl was a human being, a fairy, or an angel, is what Gringoire, sceptical philosopher and ironical poet that he was, could not decide at the first moment, so fascinated was he by this dazzling vision. She was not tall, though she seemed so, so boldly did her slender form dart about. She was swarthy of complexion, but one divined that, by day, her skin must possess that beautiful golden tone of the Andalusians and the Roman women. Her little foot, too, was Andalusian, for it was both pinched and at ease in its graceful shoe. She danced, she turned, she whirled rapidly about on an old Persian rug, spread negligently under her feet; and each time that her radiant face passed before you, as she whirled, her great black eyes darted a flash of lightning at you."

"Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do."

"Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn."

"Which do you admire, the slain or the slayer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally people are for the slayer. Hurrah for Brutus! He slew. That's virtue. Virtue, but folly too...The Brutus who slew Caesar was in love with a statue of a little boy. This statue was by the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also designed that statue of an Amazon called the beautiful limbed, Euknemos, which Nero carried with him on his journeys. This Strongylion left nothing but two statues which put Brutus and Nero in harmony. Brutus was in love with one and Nero with the other."

"Who has not heard the deep clamors of the soul?"

"Whoever harbors in his soul some secret revolt against any act whatsoever of the state, of life or of fate, borders on the riot, and as soon as it appears, begins to quiver, and feel lifted up by the whirlwind."

"Whosoever we may be, we are adventurers of the world of our thoughts."

"Will intoxicates. One can become intoxicated with one's own soul. This intoxication is called heroism."

"Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart."

"Wisdom in the beginning, reason by and by: such is the strange history of the human mind."

"Wisdom is a sacred communion."

"With a remainder of that brotherly compassion which is never totally absent from the heart of a drinker, Phoebus rolled Jehan with his foot onto one of those poor man's pillows which Providence provides on all the street corners of Paris and which the rich disdainfully refer to as heaps of garbage."

"With eyes closed is the best way to look at the soul."

"With nihilism no discussion is possible, for the nihilist doubts the existence of the person he is talking to and is not even sure of his own existence. Even he may be no more than an idea conceived in his own mind. But what he does not realize is that he accepts the existence of everything he denies simply by uttering the word 'mind'."

"Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty."

"Woe to the intellectual who lets himself fall completely from thought into reverie! He thinks he will rise again easily, and he says that, after all, it is the same thing. An error! Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie its pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment."

"Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment."

"Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom."

"Yes, God made man first, but there's always a rough draft before the final copy."

"You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Misérables is written for all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: Open to me, I come for you."

"You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience."

"You can be a great genius yet understand nothing of an art which is not your own."

"You can make no arrangements with destiny; tomorrow will not obey you."

"You have created a new thrill."

"You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do no bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear."