adri

“He arrived one day at Senez, a former episcopal city, riding a donkey, his means at that moment being so scanty that he could afford no other conveyance. The mayor, welcoming him at the gates of the residence, watched with shocked eyes while he dismounted, and laughter arose from a few citizens who were standing by.
"Gentlemen," said the bishop, "I know what has outraged you. You find it arrogant in a simple priest that he should be mounted like Jesus Christ. Let me assure you that I do it from necessity, not from vanity.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“At the time of the Emperor's coronation, some small matter of parish business took him to Paris. Among the influential personages whom he had occasion to visit was Cardinal Fesch, the uncle of Napoleon, and it happened one day, when he was waiting in the cardinal's antechamber, that the Emperor passed through on his way to call on his uncle. Seeing the old priest intently regarding him, he turned to him and asked sharply:
"Who is the gentleman who is staring at me?"
"Sire," replied M. Myriel, "you are looking at a plain man and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit."
That evening the Emperor asked the cardinal the priest's name, and shortly afterwards M. Myriel learned to his great surprise that he had been appointed Bishop of Digne.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables: Penguin Classics

“Just as in the mechanism of a clock, so in the mechanism of the military machine, an impulse once given leads to a final result; and just as indifferently quiescent till the moment when motion is transmitted to them are the parts of the mechanism which the impulse has not yet reached. Wheels creak on their axles as the cogs engage one another and the revolving pulleys whirr with the rapidity of their movement but a neighbouring wheel is as quiet and motionless as though it were prepared to remain so for a hundred years; but the moment comes when the lever catches it, and obeying the impulse that wheel begins to creak, and joins in the common motion the result and aim of which are beyond its ken.

Just as in a clock the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French -- all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm -- was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three Emperors -- that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing