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The most terrible of motives and the most unanswerable of responses: Because.
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The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.
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Genius is rare because the means of becoming one have not been available.
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Love resembles a tree: it bends under its own weight, deeply rooted in our being and sometimes turns green in the ruins of a heart.
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But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.
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The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.
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These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.
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Friend is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never.
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It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer.
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Inspiration and genius -one and the same.
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...mothers are often fondest of the child which has caused them the greatest pain.
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At the shrine of friendship never say die, let the wine of friendship never run dry.
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Creation lives, grows, and multiplies; man is but a witness.
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Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.
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Since we shall love each other, I shall be great and you shall be rich.
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Loving is half of believing.
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Does there exist an Infinity outside ourselves? Is that infinity One, immanent and permanent, necessarily having substance, since He is infinite and if He lacked matter He would be limited, necessarily possessing intelligence since He is infinite and, lacking intelligence, He would be in that sense finite. Does this Infinity inspire in us the idea of essense, while to ourselves we can only attribute the idea of existence? In order words, is He not the whole of which we are but the part?
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One only needs to see a smile in a white crape bonnet in order to enter the palace of dreams.
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What dangers you run, O noble souls! Often, you give your heart, but we take only your body. Your heart is left to you and you look at it in the shadows and shudder.
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Revery, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a natural frontier.
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There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth.
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A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.
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I'm not in the world to guard my own life, but to guard souls.
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I dislike wealth and prosperity, especially that of other men.