Top 88 Medieval Quotes

A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.

When you’re doing a medieval show like ‘Pillars,’ it starts off a bit like a school play. You’re all in funny costumes; you’ve had your coffee, and you say, ‘Good morning’. Then you go on set and, if you’ve got good actors and directors, it takes on a life of its own.

ISIS itself, it draws its central belief system from the Koran and from the writings of the Prophet Muhammad. That is undeniable. And it’s a medieval interpretation of it. It is a literal interpretation of it.

I was born on September 30, 1939, in Rosheim, a small medieval city of Alsace in France. My father, Pierre Lehn, then a baker, was very interested in music, played the piano and the organ, and became, later, having given up the bakery, the organist of the city. My mother Marie kept the house and the shop.

I grew up under the spell of London. Illustrator Kerry Lee’s evocative 1950 wall map of the city hung above our breakfast table at home in Canada. Over my corn flakes, I traced the capital’s high roads and medieval alleys.

The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.

Most cities are eclectic. There’s a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That’s fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

We can appreciate but not really understand the medieval town. We cannot comprehend its compactness, the contiguity of all its buildings as a single uninterrupted whole.

I actually only speak English and Latin. Medieval philosophy was my major, so we pretty much had to study in Latin.

I’ve been through practices during which I’ve felt as though medieval torture would have been easier.

Medieval people didn’t have special rooms for sleeping, just a single living space for everything. They put up with this lack of privacy partly for the lack of other options.

I seem to be quite drawn to the medieval, magical fantasies, as it were.

Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live in the neighborhood next door, flaunting their luxurious homes and top-quality private schools.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

Medieval alchemists, despite their lust for gold, considered mercury the most potent and poetic substance in the universe. As a child, I would have agreed with them.

Childhood is not dead. Children were worse off when we were hunter-gatherers; they were threatened in medieval times and exploited during the Industrial Revolution. Was it any better in the time of Charles Kingsley or Charles Dickens?

My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.

I decorated my house like a medieval gothic castle, European-style. Chandeliers and red velvet curtains. My bedroom is pink and black, my bathroom is totally Hello Kitty, I have a massive pink couch and a big antique gold cross.

Rational thought will always trump medieval dogma.

I mean… mankind has for hundreds of years known that torture is not a very smart way to get information. It’s horrible that we’re going back to medieval times.

Ever since the end of Medieval feudalism, and the writings of John Locke, we have understood the importance of being able to buy and sell one’s own property, including books and watches, both for reasons of economics and liberty.

In writing my historical novels, I have to rely upon my imagination to a great extent. I think of it as ‘filling in the blanks.’ Medieval chroniclers could be callously indifferent to the needs of future novelists. But I think there is a great difference between filling in the blanks and distorting known facts.

Maimed but still magnificent… Europe’s mightiest medieval cathedral.

The medieval Church believed that the resurrection of Christ marked a new time for all of humanity.

Compromise is not such ignoble and deplorable a thing as we generally think. It is rather an indispensable factor in the political strategy. Any nation that rises against the oppressors is bound to fail in the beginning and to gain partial reforms during the medieval period of its struggle through compromises.

My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.

The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.

Essentially, Robin Hood put a smackdown on the medieval equivalent of the IRS.

‘Game of Thrones’ is a fantasy show not dedicated to any specific time, but it seems to exist in sort of a 1400s medieval fantasy world, and in that setting, I wouldn’t have had a six-pack.

My view is that climate changes have happened in the last 80 years, that is, the world has got a little bit warmer, although not as warm as it has been in Medieval times, or the Bronze Age.

When I moved to Wales more than twenty years ago and began to research ‘Here Be Dragons,’ I was fascinated from the first by the Welsh medieval laws, by the discovery that women enjoyed a greater status in Wales than elsewhere in Europe.

The Islamic State is using medieval tactics.

We live in this era that has benefited from the Industrial Revolution, and we live with a kind of luxury and plenty that even all but the poorest of Americans live with a kind of sensuousness that was unimagined by medieval kings. But in order to get to this point, a lot of people had to suffer in really terrible ways.

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.

Medieval kings left the job of kindness to their queens. If the queen begged for someone not to be beheaded, the king could show mercy without losing face.

Medieval and Tudor people didn’t treat buildings as a semi-disposable resource like we do.

I’d really love to check out medieval times. I’m obsessed with that kind of stuff, like on a horseback with a sword.

Airports and ‘leg room’ on planes are a form of medieval torture.

Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it’s very, very conservative, very tribal – almost medieval.

In middle school, I was really into the ‘Redwall’ series, about anthropomorphic rodents in medieval times. I had a bowl cut, too, if you need the full imagery.

Bruges is a beautiful medieval city almost untouched by time. If you like jazz, you will be well catered for. If you like chocolate and beer, you will be in heaven.

Romney Marsh remains one of the last great wildernesses of south-east England. Flat as a desert, and at times just as daunting, it is an odd, occasionally eerie wetland straddling the coastal borders of Kent and Sussex, rich in birds, local folklore and solitary medieval churches.

If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you’d never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn’t just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.

Chemotherapy is just medieval. It’s such a blunt instrument. We’re going to look back on it like we do the dark ages.

Historically, art has always had a market. When one medieval fiefdom defeated another they would drag back its jewels, gold, tapestries and art objects as the spoils of war. Art equaled power, riches and culture.

Cities are about juxtaposition. In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It’s that contrast we like. In Bordeaux, we built law courts right next door to what is effectively a listed historic building, and that makes it exciting.

I was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends.

The trouble with ecological invocations of Nature is that they’re like calling for a medieval tool, perhaps a portcullis or an arrow slit, to fix a modern problem.

So much of our fictional medievalism is distorted through a lens of Protestantism and the Reformation, slanted even further through Victorian anti-Catholicism. The depiction of actual medieval attitudes toward the Church is remarkably rare.

My concern is to keep religion and the state separated. I don’t think that religion and politics go together. When you see political decisions colored by religion, decisions that affect us all… I thought: ‘I do not want to go back to medieval times.’

I’ve had lots of ideas. For example, I had the idea of making a small version of the Vatican’s dome. I also got ideas from medieval castles – I’ve mixed medieval castles with the Romanesque style.

Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.

As a writer, I live in the world of literature and ideas, but I entered that world as an emigre from a medieval fiefdom, the sports world of Michigan.

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.

My parents took me to a movie, and I remember wanting to sit apart from them for some reason. I wanted to be a big boy or whatever. I remember looking up on that screen. It was a movie about medieval knights. All I remember is saying, ‘I want to do that. I want to make movies.’

I don’t know if I have any particular views about women in positions of power, though I do think it’s more difficult for women, particularly in a Medieval setting. They have the additional problem that they’re a woman and people don’t want them in a position of power in an essentially patriarchal society.

If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.

It was then, I think, that I discovered that the best way of bringing a medieval subject home to my generation was not to be medieval in its treatment.

There are Arthurian legends in 14 or 15 medieval European languages. They are the product of no one time or place. On the contrary, in sum they represent a tremendous mine of human understanding, rather as the Bible does.

The ultimate binding element in the medieval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly representatives, notably the pope.

Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

Amplifying atoms is more subtle than amplifying electromagnetic waves because atoms can only change their quantum state and cannot be created. Therefore, even if one could amplify gold atoms, one would not realize the dreams of medieval alchemy.

When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing – the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.

If the Jew transmogrified into the Devil for the medieval church, he retained his devilish characteristics as Christian sentiment found other places to express itself, early socialism being one of them.

There are some examples of medieval kings who were terrible human beings but were nevertheless good kings.

I think every culture – you can call it an American Ronin, a medieval knight errant, you could talk about ‘Shane.’ There is an archetype that I think is actually common to a lot of cultures, and even the Clint Eastwood stuff was probably as influenced by the Japanese stuff, and yet done by an Italian.

In the ancient world, taxes were paid in kind: landowners paid in crops or livestock; the landless paid with their labor. Taxing trade made medieval monarchs rich and funded the early-modern state.

The concept of monogamy is an inheritance of a medieval time, when family would carry the tradition of the name and certain privileges. It’s a way of organizing society, perhaps.

My mom used to make my costumes when I was little; she sews a lot. One year, I was a bride and I had a big wedding dress and a bouquet. Another year I was a medieval princess with a long teal dress and a veil. It was a little extravagant, but it was cute!

In the West there has always been the attempt to try make the religious building, whether it’s a Medieval or Renaissance church, an eternal object for the celebration of God. The material chosen, such as stone, brick, or concrete, is meant to eternally preserve what is inside.

I loved Forcalquier, with its narrow medieval streets. Its elegant 12th Century cathedral boasts a carillon that chimes every Sunday morning. I also found a junk shop from which I could have furnished our entire farm.

In Peter Ackroyd’s book ‘London: The Biography,’ he describes the route of the medieval wall that enclosed the original city. Take the book and follow it from the Tower of London via the Barbican to Ludgate Hill. You experience the real history of London.

I not only hope that YouTube channels compete with television shows for viewers and revenue, I hope they develop a bitter rivalry which could only be settled by an elaborate medieval tournament where the two entities fight to the death in a steel cage.

In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It’s that contrast we like.

If I can’t face my accusers, that’s a joke. We did that in medieval times.

Apart from medieval China, which invented both paper and printing centuries before the West, the world had never seen government paper money until the colonial government of Massachusetts emitted a fiat paper issue in 1690.

Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.

The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial zodiac, too.

Religion is all good, but we are almost back to medieval times now, where we are obsessed with going into religious wars and electing our politicians based on their religious statements.

I was just a ham since about the age of five. If I was performing at Medieval Times or something, I’d be the court jester. That was always my defense mechanism. I was never all that funny; I was just obnoxious and loud.

Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague.

Lympne Castle opens its doors to visitors during the summer only. It is privately owned, and more an interesting medieval manor than a castle.

From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.

I spend my weekends with my Android phone in an elastic band that has tied to my Android phone my driver’s license and my credit card. That’s how I live. I’m not carrying a wallet anymore. Like, a wallet is a medieval item, right?

I haven’t studied history – I couldn’t give a discourse in medieval literature – but I am a personal historian, and I do a lot to take in the histories of the people around me.

Your chances of dying a violent death are 1/500th of what they used to be during medieval times.

It’s a fine line between magic and science. In medieval times, science was magic.