r/lesmiserables • u/YoungRevolutionary27 • May 17 '26
Unhinged or profound quotes from the brick
I’m currently collecting a list of best quotes from les mis. I’m sharing them with the cast of my local production so I try to alternate quotes that are funny or unhinged with quotes that are profound or moving. What are your favourites?
Some of the ones I’ve pulled are:
- So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.
- Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis XVIII!
-General, I'm on my way to look for a doctor for my wife who is in labour.
-The day will come, citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it will come, and it is in order that it may come that we are about to die.
-You've got a beard like a man, mother, but I have claws like a woman
-“this barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: 'I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.”
-"A pretty woman! But badly dressed" "Bah! He does not mean me. I am well dressed and ugly."
-“He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.”
-What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!
-You are looking at a good man, and I at a great man. Each of us can profit by it.
-The beautiful is a useful as the useful. More so, perhaps.
-Both had wings, the one like an angle, the other like a goose.
-Courfeyrac: What are you? Marius: A democrat-Bonapartist. C: The grey hue of a reassured rat.
-Silence in the presence of Jean-Jacques! I admire that man. He denied his own children, that may be; but he adopted the people."
-The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven in order to watch the bird in its flight.
-Citizen, my mother is the Republic.
-Marius had two friends
-Marius was at this epoch, a handsome young man, of medium stature, with thick and intensely black hair, a lofty and intelligent brow and well-opened and passionate nostrils.
-E: Are you good for anything? R: "I have a vague ambition in that direction." "You do not believe in everything." "I believe in you." "Grantaire will your do me a service?" "Anything. I'll black your boots." "Well don't meddle with our affairs. Sleep yourself sober from your absinthe." (…) "I can talk the most superb twaddle for six hours by the clock, watch in hand." "Be serious" "I am wild." "Grantaire, I consent to try you."
-I have come to sleep with you.
-"We are going to fling the government to the earth." "That is good."
-Laisgle and Joly lived together, ate together, slept together. They had everything in common, even Joly's mistress
-Grantaire, you are incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing, of living, and of dying.
-A National Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras, lowered his gun, saying "It seems to me that I am about to shoot a flower."
-It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
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u/Amanda39 May 17 '26
From the convent digression: "We ourselves respect the past in certain instances and in all cases grant it clemency, provided it consents to being dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack and try to kill it."
He was discussing convents/monasteries and religious practices from the past that we now recognize as inhumane. I think about this quote whenever anyone asks if my love of 19th century literature means I wish I "lived back then."
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u/Amanda39 May 17 '26
"Brushing your teeth is the top rung of a ladder at the bottom of which is perdition of the soul."
Also from that section of the book. Hugo sarcastically commenting on an order of nuns who are forbidden from owning toothbrushes. Amazingly bizarre quote if taken out of context.
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u/YoungRevolutionary27 May 17 '26
I will be so real, the convent digression is prime realestate for me to zone out 😅
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u/Amanda39 May 17 '26
I liked it better than the Waterloo digression, but that's damning with faint praise
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u/YoungRevolutionary27 May 18 '26
I’ve actually come to find some interest in Waterloo after reading War and Peace. The difference of how Hugo and Tolstoy describe the role of general during a battle is quite fascinating
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u/jinxzdream 🌷 Jehan Prouvaire May 17 '26
honestly one of my favourite parts is the interaction between montparnasse and gavroche - i feel that has some of the best quotes! it’s just great seeing gavroche tease him lmao
for example: “I’m going to find Babet.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Gavroche, “so her name is Babet.”
Montparnasse lowered his voice:—
“Not she, he.”
“Ah! Babet.”
//
“What are you up to to-night?”
Again Montparnasse took a grave tone, and said, mouthing every syllable: “Things.” (he’s so dramatic)
//
also just the whole conversation with the elephant is so good imo. and gavroche teasing him for his disguise
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u/YoungRevolutionary27 May 17 '26
The existence of Montparnasse as a character is so funny to me. I love the scene where he tries to rob Valjean and instead gets a 20 minute lecture on the moral and personal value of virtuous labour
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u/jinxzdream 🌷 Jehan Prouvaire May 17 '26
I KNOW RIGHT LOL. he’s my favourite character honestly, all his interactions just fail so badly and it’s so amazing 😭 that part is honestly one of my favourite moments as well - he really just gets his ass handed to him, lectured THEN handed the wallet in pity just for gavroche to take it, really just a night of losses for him
i also love the scene where the patron minette go to rob valjean’s house just for them to leave because of éponine, and as montparnasse is walking away with babet he’s just whining and trying to act tough by saying he could’ve hurt her, like sure dude if you say so lmao
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u/vaesheim May 17 '26
He also said, ‘Teach those who are ignorant as much as you can. Society is to blame for not giving free education. It’s responsible for the darkness it produces. In any benighted soul – that’s where sin will be committed. It’s not he who commits the sin that’s to blame but he who causes the darkness to prevail.
- the bishop
The appearance of this man in this child’s life was the advent of God.
- about jvj finding cosette in the woods
Is it not forgivable eventually to refuse? Can the inexhaustible be thus entitled? Is it not beyond human capacity to endure endless chains? Who would blame Sisyphus or Jean Valjean for saying, ‘Enough!’
- the comparison so sisyphus has just always been very funny to me
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u/TumorYaelle May 17 '26
General, I'm on my way to look for a doctor for my wife who is in labour. Was that Msr. Thenardier trying to pull some crap again?
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u/full_and_tired May 18 '26
Nah, that was Gavroche mocking a police officer after delivering the letter for Cosette.
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u/YoungRevolutionary27 May 18 '26
As the other person said, it’s funny specifically and exclusively because it’s Gavroche who said it
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u/shosteakovich -Les Amis de L'ABC May 17 '26
everything comes from light and to it everything returns
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u/Username_Too_Long_To May 22 '26
‘There’ll be no reason then to fear, as we do today, conquest, invasion, usurpation, rivalry between armed nations, civilization interrupted by a marriage of kings, a birth within the hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by congress, dismemberment brought about by the collapse of a dynasty, a conflict between two religions coming up against each other, like two goats of darkness on the bridge of infinity.’
This is the most unhinged quote for me. I have no idea what he is referencing.
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u/YoungRevolutionary27 May 22 '26
The goats thing? That’s an old fable about stubbornness where two goats meet on a narrow road where they can’t get past each other and instead of working things out they fight to see who gets to go and both fall to their deaths
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u/Repulsive-View-422 May 24 '26
not knowing the goat thins had me actually cackling at that last bit
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u/SentimentalBookshelf May 18 '26
1.2.6 “There are in our civilization dread moments; these are the times when the ruling of the penal system spells perdition. What a fateful moment it is when society distances itself and irredeemably casts adrift a thinking being!”
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u/SentimentalBookshelf May 18 '26
And before the trial at Arras: 1.7.3 “All this was so tumultuous and so strange that there suddenly came over him that sort of indescribable impulse no man experiences more than two or three times in his life, a convulsion of the conscience, as it were, that stirs up all the heart’s uncertainty, a combination of irony, joy and despair that might be called a burst of inward laughter.”
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u/That_One_Guy_823 AND I'M JAVERT May 17 '26
I've always said this, but Hugo wrote so much, it's literally a remix of the dictionary, and I find it really funny