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The warm applause which had greeted the beginning of his prologue still resounded in his inmost heart, and he was completely absorbed in the kind of ecstatic contemplation with which an author sees his ideas drop one by one from the actor’s lips into the silence of a vast audience. Worthy Pierre Gringoire!
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This ‘perhaps’, so dear to philosophers, emboldened Gringoire. ‘Do you know what friendship is?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ the gypsy answered. ‘It means being brother and sister, two souls touching but not merging, two fingers of the same hand.’ ‘And love?’ Gringoire continued. ‘Oh! love!’ she said, her voice trembling and her eyes radiant. ‘That is being two and yet only one. A man and a woman fusing into an angel. It’s heaven.’
Tempus edax, homo edacior [Time devours, man devours still more].* Which I should like to translate thus: ‘Time is blind, man is stupid.’
[Loyalty to kings, although interrupted by a certain number of insurrections, has won many privileges].)
To the southeast the Montagne Sainte-Genèvieve formed an immense bulge, and it was a sight to see from the top of Notre-Dame that throng of narrow winding streets (the Latin Quarter of today), those clusters of houses, spread out in all directions from the summit of that eminence, tumbling in disorder, almost vertically, down its slopes to the water’s edge, looking as if some were falling and others climbing back again, all holding on to each other. A continual stream of hundreds of black dots crossing one another on the pavement gave the impression that everything was in motion. This was how
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It seemed to the young man that there was only one purpose in life: knowledge.
Up to then he had lived only in science, now he was beginning to live in life.
From the cloister his reputation for learning had reached the people, where it had become slightly distorted, as frequently happened at the time, into renown as a sorcerer.
When, while still only small, he dragged himself tortuously and jerkily beneath the gloom of its vaults he seemed with his human face and animal’s limbs to be the native reptile of the damp and sombre paving over which the shadows of the Romanesque capitals cast so many strange shapes.
And that all came from Quasimodo. In Egypt he would have been taken for the temple’s god; the Middle Ages thought he was its demon; he was its soul.
For each of us there are certain parallelisms between our intellect, our way of life, and our character which develop continuously and are broken only by the major disturbances of life.
It meant: the printing press will kill the Church.
Every civilization begins with theocracy and ends up with democracy. This law of liberty succeeding unity is written in architecture.
architecture up to the fifteenth century was the principal record of mankind; during that time no concept of any complexity appeared in the world which was not made into a building; every popular idea like every religious law has had its monuments; finally, the human race never had an important thought which it did not write down in stone. And why? Because every thought, be it religious or philosophical, has an interest in perpetuating itself, an idea which has stirred one generation wants to stir others and leave its mark.
The invention of printing is the greatest event in history.
The Bible resembles the Pyramids, the Iliad the Parthenon, Homer Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth the last Gothic cathedral.
The microscope had not yet been invented, either for material things of for those of the spirit.
It was one of those spring days so sweet and lovely that all Paris fills the squares and promenades to celebrate as if it were a Sunday.
Put it all together as best you may. I am only a historian.
[He who does not work, let him not eat].’
Never had a living creature come so close to nothingness.
Yes, knowledge meant everything to me. It was like a sister, and a sister was enough for me. It’s not that other ideas did not come to me with age. More than once my flesh was excited by a woman’s form passing by. That force of sex and blood in the grown man which, as a foolish youth I thought I had stifled for life, had more than once convulsively shaken the iron chain of vows binding me, poor wretch, to the cold stones of the altar. But fasting, prayer, study, the mortifications of the cloister, had restored to the spirit mastery over the flesh. Anyhow, I avoided women. Besides, I had only
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God will cough some Latin in her face!
We must, however, say, for the sake of historical fidelity, that seeing her so lovely and in such distress many had been moved to pity, even some of the hardest hearts.
[John 5: 24—He that heareth my word and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death into life.]
[Jonah 2: 2–3—out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice, for thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods encompassed me.]
own. He was beautiful, he, the orphan, the foundling, the reject, he felt august and strong, he looked society in the face, that society from which he had been banished, and in which he was intervening so powerfully, that human justice whose prey he had snatched, all these tigers forced to chew on emptiness, those police agents, those judges, those executioners, all that royal might, which he had just broken, he the lowliest of the low, with the might of God.
Job [4: 15] which he scanned with staring eyes: ‘Then a spirit passed before my face; I heard a small breath; the hair of my flesh stood up.’*
struck by the sound of his voice, so raucous and yet so gentle.
Excessive pain, like excessive joy, is something violent that does not last. The human heart cannot long remain at an extreme.
The day must surely come when in France there will be only one king, one lord, one judge, one headsman, just as in paradise there is only one God!’
She fell to her knees, her head on the bed, hands clasped upon her head, filled with anxiety and trembling, and though a gypsy, idolatrous and pagan, she began sobbing to beg mercy of the good Christian God and to pray to Our Lady, her hostess. For, even if one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one always holds the religion of the temple closest to hand.
Quasimodo then looked up at the gypsy, whose body he could see in the distance, hanging from the gibbet, shuddering in her white dress in the last twitches of the death agony, then he looked down again at the archdeacon stretched out at the foot of the tower, no longer in human shape, and said with a sob that made his deep chest heave: ‘Oh! all I have loved!’
