The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.

Dying is nothing. What's terrible is not to live.

Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it. (pg. 231)

In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.

Art moves. Hence its civilizing power.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.