Great Throughts Treasury

"Imagination is intelligence with an erection."

"In all his trials he felt encouraged and sometimes even upheld by a secret force within. The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage."

"In certain vast enterprises when the superhuman seems necessary, bravery is little less than madness."

"In each age men of genius undertake the ascent. From below, the world follows them with their eyes. These men go up the mountain, enter the clouds, disappear, reappear, People watch them, mark them. They walk by the side of precipices. They daringly pursue their road. See them aloft, see them in the distance; they are but black specks. On they go. The road is uneven, its difficulties constant. At each step a wall, at each step a trap. As they rise the cold increases. They must make their ladder, cut the ice and walk on it, hewing the steps in haste. A storm is raging. Nevertheless they go forward in their madness. The air becomes difficult to breath. The abyss yawns below them. Some fall. Others stop and retrace their steps; there is a sad weariness. The bold ones continue. They are eyed by the eagles; the lightning plays about them: the hurricane is furious. No matter, they persevere."

"In every cradle decked with rosy wreath."

"In every French village there is now a lighted torch, the schoolmaster; and a mouth trying to blow it out, the priest."

"In less than two hours, all the good he had done was forgotten."

"In passing, we might say that success is a hideous thing. Its false similarity to merit deceives men...They confuse heaven's radiant stars with a duck's footprint left in the mud."

"In short, between men and women you want.Equality. Equality! You can't mean it. Man and woman are two different creatures. I said equality. I didn't say identity."

"In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: Help me!"

"In summer, he metamorphoses into a frog; and in the evening, at nightfall, by the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena, from the coal rafts and washerwomen's boats, he plunges headfirst into the Seine, and into total infraction of the laws of modesty and the police."

"In terms of policy there is only one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself, and this sovereignty of me over me is called Liberty."

"In the animal world no creature born to be a dove turns into a scavenger. This happens only among men."

"In the light of history, reason, and truth, monastic life stands condemned."

"In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven."

"In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge."

"In vain we chisel, as best we can, the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny reappears continually."

"In violent emotions, we do not read, we prostrate the paper we hold, so to speak, we strangle it like a victim, we crush the paper, we bury the nails of our wrath our delight in it."

"Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach."

"Initiative is doing the right thing without being told."

"Intellectual and moral growth is no less essential than material betterment. Knowledge is a viaticum; thought is a primary necessity; truth is as much a source of nourishment as corn. Argument lacking knowledge and wisdom grows thin. We must pity minds, no less than stomachs that go unfilled. If there is anything more poignant than a body dying for lack of food it is a mind dying for lack of light."

"Intelligence is invincible, but the elements are impregnable."

"Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant."

"Intolerance is to be found even among philosophers, and censorship even among democrats."

"Is there no hope? the sick man said, The silent doctor shook his head, And took his leave with signs of sorrow, Despairing of his fee to-morrow."

"It does not believe in something always finds himself in the periods of his life on the religion of the structure which is under his hands"

"It is a charming quality of the happiness we inspire in others that, far from being diminished like a reflection, it comes back to us enhanced."

"It is a consoling idea ... to think that the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still encumbered with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its paraphernalia of torture, permanent and riveted to the pavement, the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross du Trahoir, the Marché aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfauçon, the barrier des Sergents, the Place aux Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint Jacques, without reckoning the innumerable ladders of the provosts, the bishop of the chapters, of the abbots, of the priors, who had the decree of life and death--without reckoning the judicial drownings in the river Seine; it is consoling to-day, after having lost successively all the pieces of its armor, its luxury of torment, its penalty of imagination and fancy, its torture for which it reconstructed every five years a leather bed at the Grand Châtelet, that ancient suzerain of feudal society almost expunged from our laws and our cities, hunted from code to code, chased from place to place, has no longer, in our immense Paris, any more than a dishonored corner of the Grève--than a miserable guillotine, furtive, uneasy, shameful, which seems always afraid of being caught in the act, so quickly does it disappear after having dealt its blow."

"It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper; it is a still less pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where one is to sleep."

"It is better to reenter hell and become an angel, than to remain in heaven and become a demon."

"It is by suffering that human beings become angels."

"It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life."

"It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset."

"It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like."

"It is needful that there be in the poet a philosopher, yet also something more. He who is lacking in this celestial quality, the dream, is a philosopher only."

"It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie."

"It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion --to rid God of His Maggots."

"It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her."

"It is possible to conceive of something even more terrible than a hell of suffering, and that is a hell of boredom."

"It is sometimes more difficult to be the second than the first. It requires less genius, but more courage. The first, intoxicated by the novelty, may ignore the danger; the second sees the abyss, and rushes into it."

"It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes."

"It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive. Why should it exaggerate? There is that which should be destroyed and that which should be simply illuminated and studied. How great is the force of benevolent and searching examination! We must not resort to the flame where only light is required."

"It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe."

"It seems that a certain power of achievement is given to man. He appropriates creation to human needs. Such is his function. He has the audacity necessary to accomplish it; one might also say the impiety.... Man, this short-lived being, this creature always surrounded by death, undertakes the infinite.... He has his idea of fitness; the universe must accept it. Besides, has he not a universe of his own? He expects to make of it what seems to him good. A universe is raw material. The world, work of God, is man's canvas. Everything restrains man, but nothing stops him. He overcomes limits by jumping over them. The impossible is a perpetually receding frontier.... Formerly he took all this trouble for Xerxes; today, less foolish, he takes the trouble for himself. This diminution of stupidity is called progress."

"It was a hippopotamus attempting to catch a chamois."

"It was there, too, that these sweet and heartrending words were said by a little foundling whom the convent was rearing through charity. She heard the others talking about their mothers, and in her little nook she whispered, As for me, my mother wasn't there when I was born."

"It would have been difficult to say what was the nature of this look, and whence proceeded the flame that flashed from it. It was a fixed gaze, which was, nevertheless, full of trouble and tumult. And, from the profound immobility of his whole body, barely agitated at intervals by an involuntary shiver, as a tree is moved by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more marble than the balustrade on which they leaned; or the sight of the petrified smile which contracted his face,— one would have said that nothing living was left about Claude Frollo except his eyes."

"It's the fifth of June, it's very dark; since morning I've been waiting for daybreak. It hasn't come, and I'll bet it won't come all day. It's the negligence of a badly paid clerk."

"Javert's ideal was not to be humane, not to be great, not to be sublime; it was to be irreproachable. Now he had just failed."

"Jean Valjean entered the galleys sobbing and trembling; he left hardened. He entered in despair; he left sullen. What had happened within the soul?"