If you emerge from that sad place with thoughts of hatred and of wrath against mankind, you are deserving of pity; if you emerge with thoughts of good-will and of peace, you are more worthy than any one of us.

The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else.

Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the fields of battle which have their heroes; obscure heroes, who are, sometimes, grander than the heroes who win renown.

If you wish to gain an idea of what revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of the nature of progress, call it To-morrow.

It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.

If I had learned to read I should not perhaps have stolen the bread. You see, I could not learn to read. When I was at the galleys, I learned. There was a school for convicts.

Its laugh is the mouth of a volcano which spatters the whole earth.

One is not unoccupied because one is absorbed. There is visible labor and invisible labor. To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act.

The dawn which follows a battle always rises on naked corpses.

As conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? the Revolution of the True.

Love is the folly of men and the wit of God.

He who has not been a stubborn accuser in prosperity should hold his peace in the face of ruin.