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Victor Hugo
Variety, Eternity, Proportion : Time was the architect - Europe was the builder

From: Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris 

     Here unfold themselves to the eye, successively and at one glance, the three deep Gothic doorways; the richly traced and sculptured band of twenty-eight royal niches; the immense central rose-window, flanked by its two lateral windows, like a priest by the deacon and subdeacon; the lofty and fragile gallery of trifoliated arches supporting a heavy platform on its slender columns; finally, the two dark and massive towers with their projecting slate roofs--harmonious parts of one magnificent whole, rising one above another in five gigantic storeys, massed yet unconfused, their innumerable details of statuary, sculpture, and carving boldly allied to the impassive grandeur of the whole. A vast symphony in stone, as it were; the colossal achievement of a man and a nation--one and yet complex--like the Iliades and the Romances to which it is sister--prodigious result of the union of all the resources of an epoch, where on every stone is displayed in a hundred variations the fancy of the craftsman controlled by the genius of the artist; in a word, a sort of human Creation, mighty and prolific, like the divine Creation, of which it seems to have caught the double characteristics--variety and eternity.... Read Complete

    Cf.  Pictures of Notre Dame by Kostas Katsiyiannis. Cf. by V. Hugo: In a grand parliament of intelligence, My Revenge is Fraternity! (margin: the Enlargement of Civilization) * R. Scruton, Architecture needs a Grammar * Giannopoulos, The Greek line & the Greek color