All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.
When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.
The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.
More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.
I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.