He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

Conscience is God present in man.

The hand which moves over the dial moves also among souls.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?

The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most.

I believe that pity is a law like justice, and that kindness is a duty like uprightness. That which is weak has a right to the kindness and pity of that which is strong. In the relations of man with the animals...there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to humans ethics. Are there not here unsounded depths for the thinker? Is one to think oneself mad because one has the sentiment of universal pity in one's heart?