Top 100 Medieval Quotes
#1. I was influenced by the medieval theological beliefs when I presented Satan in Jesus' dream as unable to figure out who or what Jesus is, and unable to see the future.
Anne Rice
#2. She stood slim and proud as some medieval witch princess against dawn.
L.J.Smith
#3. They gazed at her with awe, feeling to the full that medieval reverence for someone obviously touched in the head.
Elizabeth Goudge
#4. ...early medieval Ireland sounds like a somewhat crazed Wisconsin, in which every dairy farm is an armed camp at perpetual war with its neighbors, and every farmer claims he is a king.
David Willis McCullough
#5. Today, a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country. You
Yuval Noah Harari
#6. We can hardly imagine a state of mind in which all material objects were regarded as symbols of spirtual truths or episodes in sacred history. Yet, unless we make this effort of imagination, Medieval art is largely incomprehensible.
Kenneth Clark
#7. My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.
Sharon Kay Penman
#8. From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.
Malcolm Gladwell
#9. Ah, life in medieval times! Yeah, we only have to worry about losing our heads every day.
David Kuklis
#11. To the medieval mind a liberty was a right to the enjoyment of a specific property It was a freedom to do something with one's own without interference by the king or any other man.
Arthur Bryant
#12. We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition. We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.
Terry Jones
#13. Religious fundamentalists belong in a museum at the exhibit of medieval antiquities, not in any nation.
Abhijit Naskar
#14. almost unique in Eastern Europe in possessing its own constitution, called even now "the Magdeburg rights" and based upon medieval laws formulated in the city of Magdeburg? Was
William Styron
#15. There are some examples of medieval kings who were terrible human beings but were nevertheless good kings.
George R R Martin
#16. I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that's quickly giving way to modern technology.
Mary Kubica
#17. Airports and 'leg room' on planes are a form of medieval torture.
Mary E. Pearson
#18. In medieval times, artists had patrons that supported them and this is a similar thing, ... We're basically saying, 'Wouldn't you like to be a part of this'
Steve Young
#19. Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
Salman Rushdie
#20. Your mind is your spirit; do not seek any other hidden soul inside you! All is in the brain! The depiction of a spirit rising to the sky is no more real than a medieval Scandinavian fairytales!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#21. It usually takes me about three years to research and write one of my historical sagas; this is one reason why I take medieval mystery breaks, for they can be completed in only a year.
Sharon Kay Penman
#22. Only the silver head of his cane blazed with reflected fire, held aloft above the grave like a medieval necromancer summoning spirits from the vasty deep.
Lauren Willig
#23. The American legal industry is a medieval guild in which the prosecutors, bar, and bench join hands to ensure that legal invoices are paid, no matter how excessive.
Conrad Black
#24. 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.
John McGahern
#25. 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.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#26. We had extremely democratic town councils in medieval Italy which knew the value of working together, and every now and then, down the centuries, this spirit returns.
Dario Fo
#27. 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.
Tyler Oakley
#28. The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#29. Krakow is one of my favorite places on earth. It is a medieval city full of young people. A wonderful, striking combination.
Jonathan Carroll
#30. 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.
Arne Glimcher
#31. Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#32. 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.
Anne Rice
#33. Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
Martin Amis
#34. No stigma attaches to the love of money in America, and provided it does not exceed the bounds imposed by public order, it is held in honor. The American will describe as noble and estimable ambition that our medieval ancestors would have called base cupidity.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#35. Most of the tools from medieval times were extensions of the physical self. Tools are now extensions of the mental self.
Lotoya Peterson
#36. 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.
Piers Corbyn
#37. Sir Walter Scott created rank & caste in the South and also reverence for and pride and pleasure in them. Life on the Mississippi
Don Quixote swept admiration for medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence. Ivanhoe restored it. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain
#38. The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, the walls surrounding a medieval castle: obsolete walls evoke nostalgia. Make your walls obsolete.
Khang Kijarro Nguyen
#39. No doubt it was "unenlightened" of the crusaders to have been typical medieval warriors, but it seems even more unenlightened to anachronistically impose the Geneva Conventions on the crusaders while pretending that their Islamic opponents were innocent victims.
Rodney Stark
#40. To make this sign, the first and little fingers are upraised and the other fingers folded in towards the palm. This was a secret sign used for recognition purposes by followers of the medieval witch cult who were traditionally worshippers of the pagan Horned God.
Paul Rhys Mountfort
#41. The faint hints of color in her complexion, her tawny blond hair, her extraordinary thinness, all spoke of that unearthly grace modern poets find in the medieval statues. Had she been happy, she'd have been ravishing: happiness constitutes pure poetry, for women.
Honore De Balzac
#42. Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.
Ian Hacking
#43. If there was anything obviously heroic about medieval surgery, it was the patient.
David C. Lindberg
#44. Imagine: in the medieval ages, there was no evidence of how the history of mankind has been affected by witchcraft. But there is significant factual history of how brutality and sadism of mankind have been displayed in the most obscene manner in the name of witch-hunt.
Kangana Ranaut
#45. When you get a new worldview you get a new world. It's like the shift from medieval Christianity to the Renaissance and enlightenment.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
#46. It would be erroneous to argue that the Reformation broke with the medieval Catholic paradigm in every respect. Some elements of Protestantism were in fact a continuation, even if in a new form, of what typified the Catholic model also.
David J. Bosch
#47. Dresden: of all German cities, Smiley's favourite. He had loved its architecture, its odd jumble of medieval and classical buildings, sometimes reminiscent of Oxford, its cupolas, towers, and spires, its copper-green roofs shimmering under a hot sun.
John Le Carre
#48. No medieval monarch in the whole of British history ever had such power as every modern British Prime Minister has in his or her hands. Nor does any American President have power approaching this
Tony Benn
#49. He was aware for the first time of how quiet the city had gotten. After dark the streets and canals seemed to empty out. As if Venice felt less of an obligation to pretend to be part of this millennium at night, and had reverted to its medieval self again.
Lev Grossman
#50. Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
Alfred North Whitehead
#51. In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called acedia, a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation'
a devaluing of the world and its creator.
Richard Louv
#52. We cannot rule out the possibility that the changes of recent decades are part of a natural rebound from the 'Little Ice Age' that followed the medieval warm period and ended in the 19th century.
Steven F. Hayward
#53. Mum insists on calling Sat Nav "the Talking Map," like she's a medieval peasant who believes in witchcraft.
Marian Keyes
#54. Rebuilt in Victorian times, it retained the modesty of its medieval origins. Small and neat, its spire indicated the direction of heaven without trying to pierce a hole in it.
Diane Setterfield
#55. Religion glorifies the dogma of a despotic, mythical God. Atheism ennobles the interests of free and progressive Man. Religion is superstition. Atheism is sanity. Religion is medieval. Atheism is modern.
E. Haldeman-Julius
#56. In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.
Alfred North Whitehead
#57. Medieval Italian life had recently become so fascinating for Vronsky that he even began wearing his hat and a wrap thrown over his shoulder in a medieval fashion, which was very becoming to him.
Leo Tolstoy
#59. But in practice the great difference between the medieval ethics and ours is that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the educated are sins at all.
G.K. Chesterton
#60. We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.
E. O. Wilson
#61. Everyone in the '80s was reading Tolkien; he invented this whole medieval fantasy genre.
William Kircher
#62. The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.
Peter Singer
#63. We are living in modern times throughout the world and yet are dominated by medieval minds.
Eqbal Ahmad
#64. So many of the fantasy stories I encountered growing up were set in worlds that were largely modelled on medieval Europe in one way or another. Lots of white folks in feudal societies, castles and kings, that kind of thing.
Chris Roberson
#65. 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.
Sharon Kay Penman
#66. Charlotte wondered if she would have recognized the crazy much earlier if he looked more like Steve Buscemi then Mr. Medieval Hotness.
Shannon Hale
#67. Maimed but still magnificent ... Europe's mightiest medieval cathedral.
R. W. Apple Jr.
#68. 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.
Richard Dawkins
#69. We forget to appreciate what it meant for people to escape from the wages of medieval times to incomes two or three times the medieval level, as most people in Britain, America, France, and the German lands came to enjoy in the 19th century.
Edmund S. Phelps
#70. I think five percent of all songs can be love songs, and another five percent can be miscellaneous or political, but the rest should just be about medieval feminists.
Devendra Banhart
#71. 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.
Claire Tomalin
#72. The idea that war should be conducted within a moral framework may seem like a quaint medieval practice, but as speech separates humans from the apes, so morality separates civilisation from the barbarians.
Eric Corley
#73. 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.
Wolfgang Ketterle
#74. Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.
Oscar Wilde
#75. Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
Marshall McLuhan
#76. In my opinion, the difference between the crusaders and us was a matter of degree. Europe's medieval Catholics claimed their goal was to save Muslims from purgatory; we claimed that we wanted to help the Saudis modernize.
John Perkins
#77. Just as the medieval church cut off the congregation from participating in the sung worship of the service, today many well-meaning Christian leaders have reconstructed a sung worship wherein congregational participation does not matter.
Douglas Bond
#78. In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like.
Richard Rogers
#79. Included in the Presqueville is the Cathedrale St.-Jean, a church built during medieval times, including both Romanesque and Gothic styles; its nave, with its flying buttresses flinging out their support as the walls sweep toward the heavens
Jane Thompson
#80. When the conscience runs pure and strong in the heart of thinking humanity, there is not power in any fundamentalism to take hold of the human civilization and drag it back to the medieval days of barbarianism.
Abhijit Naskar
#81. The medieval hall house was very primitive when it became the characteristic form of dwelling of the landowner of the Middle Ages.
Stephen Gardiner
#82. 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.
Richard Rogers
#83. Medieval anatomists called women's external genitals the "pudendum," a word derived from the Latin pudere, meaning "to make ashamed." Our genitalia were thus named "from the shamefacedness that is in women to have them seen."1
Emily Nagoski
#84. How much I wanted to move into these rooms and live forever in this domain of medieval autumns and mute winters, serving out my sentence of life among all the visible and invisible wonders I had only dreamed about from so far away.
Thomas Ligotti
#85. I have a master's degree in medieval literature. Wyverns - or firedrakes, if you prefer - were once common in European mythology and legends." "But you . . . you're my accountant," Sarah sputtered. "Do you have any idea how many English majors are accountants?" Vivian asked with raised eyebrows.
Deborah Harkness
#86. 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.
Emma Stone
#87. This isn't the medieval era, my lord. I'll be damned if I need to put on a dog-and-pony show with a peer as part of a business deal."
"Speaking as the other half of the dog-and-pony show," Westcliff said sardonically, "I'm not fond of the idea either.
Lisa Kleypas
#88. I cannot tell whether diamonds appeared in his eyes or mine as the shine of adoration became the icon one sees in history, a Byzantine sparkle, Medieval armor against all odds.
Alice Shapiro
#89. Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as
Karl Marx
#91. Benjamin Franklin and the whole idea of a new attitude to money: "Time is money." He invented that idea. Before that, time wasn't money in the same way; in the medieval age it was regarded as sinful for money to be the object of your life.
Tom Hodgkinson
#92. I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very subversive and very important.
Jayne Anne Phillips
#93. The hold of the evolutionary paradigm is so powerful that an idea which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious twentieth century scientific theory has become a reality for evolutionary biologists.
Michael Denton
#94. It's medieval," Marcus said. "You might as well walk down the street in a suit of armor.
Tiffany Reisz
#95. 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.
John Millington Synge
#96. As the medieval mind blamed God for human suffering, so the modern mind blames 'the system' for the industrial blight and plague of technology.
Jennifer Stone
#97. If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?
Barbara Tuchman
#99. It is in the fusion of autochthonous Jews with semi-Jewish Khazars and Kabars in the tenth century that we must seek the earliest demographic basis of the Jewish population of medieval Hungary.
Raphael Patai
#100. 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.
Jill Lepore
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