Words matter. These are the best Middle Ages Quotes from famous people such as Lytton Strachey, M. J. Rose, Mark Rylance, John Grierson, Carl Jung, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
For three hundred years we have had our focus on the individual. We have distinguished him from the objective world as the Middle Ages did not think of doing. We have given him the world and the universe as a playground for exploration and discovery.
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.
Generals think war should be waged like the tourneys of the Middle Ages. I have no use for knights; I need revolutionaries.
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.
Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world – or at least all of Europe – aspired to be Parisian.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.
During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.
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.
In the absence of evidence, superstition. It’s a Middle Ages thing. That’s my theory anyway.
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.
It flourished with the Saracens, and suffered in the obscure and fanatical days of the Middle Ages.
We reserve the term ‘genius’ for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term ‘genius’ was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling.
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.
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.
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.
Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.
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.
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 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.
The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.
If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication.
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.
‘Simeon’s Gift’ is really – it’s about a musician who – in the Middle Ages, who goes out to find his muse.
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.
