Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Medieval. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Medieval Quotes And Sayings by 95 Authors including Mimi Jean Pamfiloff,Bertrand Russell,Terry Jones,Andre Maurois,James Randi for you to enjoy and share.
You will marry me. We will be together. I will not discuss this again." His dark eyes turned into bottomless, black pits. "Capisce?" he growled. Barbarian. Or, is he a medieval bastard? Dammit why didn't I pay closer attention to time periods in history class?
The barbarian invasion put an end, for six centuries, to the civilization of western Europe. It lingered in Ireland until the Danes destroyed it in the ninth century;
Medieval learning was really advanced.
We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity
romantic love and gunpowder.
We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back.
If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication.
When that Aprille with his shoures sote.
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertue engendred is the flour.
Resistance is Feudal.
With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more.
Could I but know all, I would have the faith of a Breton peasant woman
Obtruded on us by the Scottish historians. [* Chron. Sax. p. 19.] [** W. Malms, p. 19.]
When you look at the original 'Paradise Lost' film, you see three kids who can't defend themselves, being persecuted in a medieval way - witchcraft, satanic worship. It was kind of primitive.
The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation.
We are living in modern times throughout the world and yet are dominated by medieval minds.
Medieval justice was scrupulous about holding proper trials and careful not to sentence without proof of guilt, but it achieved proof by confession rather than evidence, and confession was routinely obtained by torture.
No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.
Gabriel gazed at his reflection in the mirror. To his shock and dismay, he was clad only in his underwear, a cheeky pair of boxer shorts that had the phrase 'Medievalists Do It in the Dark (Ages)' printed all over them in phosphorescent lettering.
In times gone by there lived a Count of Ponthieu, who loved chivalry and the pleasures of the world beyond measure, and moreover was a stout knight and a gallant gentleman
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.
Sorry. I'm not, like, medieval torture expert guy.
The Middle Ages were long preoccupied with the nature of the concept, or of the notion which the intellect abstracts from the object; but they never doubted that its content was borrowed from the content of the object, still less that the object really existed.
We need knew knights, but without swords.
With the advance of feudalism came the growth of iron armor, until, at last, a fighting-man resembled an armadillo.
The impersonal forces of over-population and over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system.
The youthfull knight could not for ought be staide,
But forth vnto the darksome hole he went,
And looked in:his glistring armor made
A litle glooming light, much like a shade,
In this timeless land of enchantment, the age of chivalry, magic and make-believe are reborn and fairy tales come true.
And high above, depicted in a tower,
Sat Conquest, robed in majesty and power,
Under a sword that swung above his head,
Sharp-edged and hanging by a subtle thread.
We thought ourselves kings of the ages. Now we find that all our civilisation has been nothing but a brief, brightly lit nursery, where we have played with paper crowns and wooden sceptres.
The subjects which he has chosen, however, are of both historic and dramatic importance, and they have the added value of giving the modern reader a clear picture of the state of semi-lawlessness which existed in Europe, during the middle ages.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain was the incubus of Europe. Gloomy and portentous, she chilled the world with her baneful shadow.
Bright was the summer of 1296. The war which had desolated Scotland was then at an end.
I am not in any way opposed to medieval studies (or for that matter Latin).
I launched into a discourse on the gradual contraction of medieval oaths invoking the Virgin Mother Mary's menstrual blood and the seepage of Christ's wounds, astounded to find any use for my college study of medieval literature.
In the youth of middle age
square-shouldered, stocky, decisive, blatantly virile
...
Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.
Above the plains up on the hill there stood a castle bold
A gleaming palace made of white, a pillar to behold
The horsemen lived in service to the castle and the crown
But the knights rose up and killed the kings
And it all burned down.
Growing up in England, I was constantly surrounded by the Arthurian legend.
But our depraved age does not deserve to enjoy such a blessing as those ages enjoyed when knights-errant took upon their shoulders the defence of kingdoms, the protection of damsels, the succour of orphans and minors, the chastisement of the proud, and the recompense of the humble.
I was raised in a Catholic household and went to a Catholic school, and my childhood brain perceived medieval Catholicism as an action movie: There's this crazy omnipresent guy who can destroy you at any moment.
News, like men, traveled slowly; intelligence of Barbarossa's death in Cilicia took four months to reach Germany.16 Medieval man could eat his breakfast without being disturbed by the industriously collected calamities of the world; or those that came to his ken were fortunately too old for remedy.
Now entertain conjecture of a time, When creeping murmur and the pouring dark Fill the wide vessel of the universe ... Chorus Henry V
Castles, in Nanny Ogg's experience, were like swans. They looked as if they were drifting regally through the waters of Time, but in fact there was a hell of a lot of activity going on underneath.
Today, a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country. You
Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars.
We in middle age require adventure.
Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.
Technically, I'm a knight. My family goes back a thousand years in the Naples area. We're a titled, noble people.
Like the sea, the Web is volatile: 70 percent of its communications last less than four months. Its virtue (its virtuality) entails a constant present-which for medieval scholars was one of the definitions of hell.23
I seem to be quite drawn to the medieval, magical fantasies, as it were.
Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me time for thought.
In the early Middle Ages the dominant form of political organization in Western Europe was the Germanic kingdom, and the German kingdom was in some ways the complete antithesis of the modern state. (p. 13)
In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of things is seldom so clear to those who live them. To most thoughtful men it has generally seemed that theirs was an Age of Confusion.
Knight without fear and without reproach.
This work is an attempt to understand the time I live in.
Visigothic kings
The next time somebody announces that he plans to get Medieval on your ass, tell him you're going to get Renaissance on his gonads.
There were some ages in Western history that have occasionally been called Dark. They were dark, it is said, because in them learning declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief. A cause-effect relationship is frequently felt to exist between the pause and the belief.
If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the "bourgeois" under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.
But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages,
Fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever. It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred
always wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age,
Should we Knights, in years to come, dwindle into memory, perhaps the world will recall that in the days of our demise we stood, hewing at the fetters of captive men.
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.
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.
What baron or squire Or knight of the shire Lives half so well as a holy friar.
A wandering knight
wambling in an endless road
Thinking to himself
Where the others are?
Taking care of what?
Who am I?
but a fading footprint
on a dark empty land
under a starless sky
seized by roaring shadows
and delusive hopes
Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too
England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus
Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die
When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.
Now will I rehearse before you a very ancient Breton Lay. As the tale was told to me, so, in turn, will I tell it over again, to the best of my art and knowledge. Hearken now to my story, its why and its reason.
India is still medieval.
Commentators who today talk of 'The Dark Ages' when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance. Both Aquinas' intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world.
Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration
I'd like to do a story about the medieval ages where in every scene you'd sort of feel that you were in the 12th century. That would be great to get that feeling.
It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones.
What was it Catelyn Stark had called them, that night at Bitterbridge? The knights of summer. And now it was autumn and they were falling like leaves ...
Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.
Look not just at the Roman campagna, the pageantry of Venice, and the proud expression of Charles I astride his horse, but also have a look at the bowl on the sideboard, the dead fish in your kitchen, and the crusty bread loaves in the hall.
Haste to thie kiste, thie onlie dortoure bedde.Cale, as the claie whiche will gre on thie hedde,Is Charitie and Love aminge highe elves;Knightis and Barons live for pleasure and themselves.
You never tire of the moor. You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious.
Primeval forests! virgin sod! That Saxon has not ravish'd yet, Lo! peak on peak in stairways set- In stepping stairs that reach to God! Here we are free as sea or wind, For here are set Time's snowy tents In everlasting battlements Against the march of Saxon mind.
At the city gates a corpse or two hung, moldering, from the municipal gallows. Within the walls, there were the usual dirty streets, the customary gamut of smells, from wood smoke to excrement, from geese to incense, from baking bread to horses, swine and unwashed humanity. Peasants,
The time and moment of Ancient and Medieval is gone, a new change is sought from within by the lifeforce a moment that is for NOW and not holding on the Past which though Primordial is eternally in the present living for the Future.
Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.
The countryside they
In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets - when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta - there lived a tailor in Gloucester.
Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones, And tottering empires rush by their own weight.
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.
I met a travler from an ancient land.
I'm inspired by history, different periods.
I was in the black silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under indifferent stars like a seam.
I was 16 before I met another passionate collector. One summer, I visited England; a new friend took me calling on his dotty, brilliant old aunt. She occupied a quaint house in Kent. Its walls were lined with glass-fronted cases full of what? Ancient shoe buckles.
The single most pressing earthly obligation of every medieval artisan was the establishment of a good personal reputation.11
Gambling in medieval France was a simple business. All you needed were some friends, a pot, and a chicken. In fact, you didn't need friends - you could do this with your enemies - but the pot and the chicken were essential.
And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.
History, that is, the unconscious, common, swarm life of mankind uses every moment of the life of kings as an instrument for its own ends
Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.
Castles are Forrests of stones.
Seance to renaissance. So it begins