Middle Ages Quotes

Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities – in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity – romantic love and gunpowder.

During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

When learning was monopolized by the monks in the Middle Ages, people specialized only in warfare and statecraft. And even these were not altogether free from the scholastic influence.

Respect can be as elusive as the unicorn. I know something of this because I write books that are set in the Middle Ages, and the historical novel is often seen as the unwanted stepchild in the fictional family. I know even more about respect – or the lack thereof – because I live in New Jersey.

The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them – the ‘physical book,’ a new phrase in our language – is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

In the absence of evidence, superstition. It’s a Middle Ages thing. That’s my theory anyway.

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times.

Modern as the style of Pascal’s writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.

I have often called attention to the fact that walking through the streets in the Middle Ages was a different experience from nowadays. Right and left, there were house facades that were built out of what the soul felt and thought. Every key, every lock, carried the imprint of the person who had made it.

I don’t think that we are completely dominated by what we have inherited from the past, but it is the case that as far back as you can go – just to Homer, but also to the literature of Rome, the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance – what you will find is that women‘s voices are not taken seriously.

In the Middle Ages and beyond, the target was the Court Jew who had the ear of the ruler; during the Inquisition it was the Spanish Jews who thrived after their conversion to Christianity.

There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.

There was an ingredient used in perfumes and remedies in the Middle Ages called ‘momie’ that is certainly one of the most fascinating I’ve come across.

Any beings advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances are at least a thousand years beyond our technical level. Spending gobs of time examining our missiles is equivalent to sending the Air Force back to the Middle Ages and insisting they examine the chain mail factories.

In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.

The genius of ‘Game of Thrones’ is that in this rich imagining of a world redolent of the medieval, the rules of a Middle Ages morality play have been so thoroughly discarded.

We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important – just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.

In my mind, if you went back to the Middle Ages, in Italy they’d be speaking Middle Age Italian. And at that point, it would obviously be indecipherable for us, but for the people of that time, it was just normal talking.

Generals think war should be waged like the tourneys of the Middle Ages. I have no use for knights; I need revolutionaries.

Real socialism is inside man. It wasn’t born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can’t say it is finished.

Morally, the world is both better and worse than it was. We are worse off than in the middle ages, or the 17th and 18th centuries, in that we have the atomic menace.

The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

At the end of the Middle Ages, nobody would ever have expected the monasteries to vanish from the scene within a generation – yet they did. Change does happen.

‘Simeon’s Gift‘ is really – it’s about a musician who – in the Middle Ages, who goes out to find his muse.

Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There’s hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London’s texture.

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.

Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

During the Middle Ages they understood that words accompanied by imagery are much more memorable. By making the margins of a book colorful and beautiful, illuminations help make the text unforgettable. It’s unfortunate that we’ve lost the art of illumination.

That whole heroic notion of the women warriors known as Amazons is extremely appealing. It was appealing in antiquity, and, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, they’re always portrayed as heroic, courageous, and the equals of men, and that’s just extremely attractive and has been since antiquity.

For us, when we think about the Middle Ages, it’s sort of this rarefied, distant time that we have no connection to, especially if you grew up in America.

The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.

I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

The scientific-rational mindset is as much a cosmology as the Catholic mindset was in the Middle Ages; scientists are so proud of their mindset and convinced that it’s the only reality. I find that worrying.

Musically, there’s a movement called the flatted fifth that’s really evil-sounding. It was outlawed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. That movement is what gives you a real evil sound that conjures up dark, fantastic images. It’s like an audio horror movie. It personifies what a horror movie is about.

Various Turkish people invaded southwest Asia during the Middle Ages and carved an empire for themselves from lands occupied by the indigenous Semitic and Indo-European inhabitants.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Biarritz was a community of whalers. During the Middle Ages, it had grown from a small fishing village into a profitable whaling industry. Whale oil was liquid gold to these sea-faring folk.

Some have called we rock and roll performers who never retire ‘troubadours.’ I enjoy this misnomer immensely. While there are many differences between me and my distant predecessors in L’Occitane, I do believe there is a lineage that connects us of the last 70 years with those romantic singers of the High Middle Ages.

It flourished with the Saracens, and suffered in the obscure and fanatical days of the Middle Ages.

I would go from one city to the next, inspired by the monks in the Middle Ages, who would carry knowledge from one monastery to the next monastery.