# Quote — Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

> The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for Philip Augustus, who laid the last.
>
> On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of a wrinkle, one always finds a scar. Tempus edax, homo edacior; which I should be glad to translate thus: time is blind, man is stupid.

- Author: [Victor Hugo](https://www.leafyquotes.com/victor-hugo.md)
- Book: [The Hunchback of Notre-Dame](https://www.leafyquotes.com/victor-hugo/the-hunchback-of-notre-dame.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hunchback_of_Notre-Dame#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/victor-hugo/the-hunchback-of-notre-dame/the-church-of-notre-dame

## More from this book

> When they tried to detach this skeleton from the one it embraced, it crumbled to dust.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/victor-hugo/the-hunchback-of-notre-dame/when-they-tried.md)

> Oh, why am I not of stone, like you?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/victor-hugo/the-hunchback-of-notre-dame/oh-why-am-i-not.md)

> It was, in truth, a spectacle worthy of a more intelligent spectator than Phœbus, to see how these beautiful maidens, with their envenomed and angry tongues, wound, serpent-like, and glided and writhed around the street dancer. They were cruel and graceful; they searched and rummaged maliciously in her poor and silly toilet of spangles and tinsel. There was no end to their laughter, irony, and humiliation. Sarcasms rained down upon the gypsy, and haughty condescension and malevolent looks. One would have thought they were young Roman dames thrusting golden pins into the breast of a beautiful slave. One would have pronounced them elegant greyhounds, circling, with inflated nostrils, round a poor woodland fawn, whom the glance of their master forbade them to devour.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/victor-hugo/the-hunchback-of-notre-dame/it-was-in-truth.md)