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True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost
or a handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion
and its hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely
great and the infinitely little.
If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the
sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love.
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1579
Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire
paradise; we possess paradise, we desire heaven.
Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love.
Understand how to find it there. Love has contemplation as
well as heaven, and more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.
‘Does she still come to the Luxembourg?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘This
is the church where she attends mass, is it not?’ ‘She no longer
comes here.’ ‘Does she still live in this house?’ ‘She has
moved away.’ ‘Where has she gone to dwell?’
‘She did not say.’
What a melancholy thing not to know the address of
one’s soul!
Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses.
Shame on the passions which belittle man! Honor to
the one which makes a child of him!
There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the
night. There is a being who carried off my sky when she went
away.
Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same
grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness,
gently caressing a finger,—that would suffice for my
eternity!
Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of
love, is to live in it.
Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled
with this torture. There is ecstasy in agony.
Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they
sing.
1580 Les Miserables
Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.
Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it
is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown
destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for a man
with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears
to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive. The definitive,
meditate upon that word. The living perceive the
infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the
dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate.
Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies,
forms, appearances! Death will deprive him of all. Try to
love souls, you will find them again.
I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who
was in love. His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows
were in holes; water trickled through his shoes, and the stars
through his soul.
What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander
thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion.
It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it
no longer rests on anything that is not elevated and great. An
unworthy thought can no more germinate in it, than a nettle
on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul, inaccessible to vulgar
passions and emotions, dominating the clouds and the
shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its vanities,
its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels
anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny,
as the crests of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.
If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would
become extinct.
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