These medieval quotes will inspire you. Medieval, of, relating to, or characteristic of the Middle Ages medieval history medieval architecture.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging medieval quotes, medieval sayings, and medieval proverbs.
Best Medieval Quotes
- “Our horizon is the creation of a noble society to which, like the medieval builder of those glorious cathedrals, you will have added your conception, your artful piece of stone.” ~ Adrienne Clarkson
- “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.” ~ Arthur Erickson
- “Paul Ryan, who teamed up with Akin in the House to sponsor harsh anti-abortion bills, may look young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids. But he’s just a fresh face on a Taliban creed – the evermore antediluvian, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-gay conservative core. Amiable in khakis and polo shirts, Ryan is the perfect modern leader to rally medieval Republicans who believe that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs.” ~ Maureen Dowd
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“The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.” ~ Peter Singer
- “In medieval times the habit arose of expressing a man’s wealth, no longer in terms of the amount of land in his estate, but of the amount of pepper in his pantry. One way of saying that a man was poor was to say that he lacked pepper. The wealthy lacked pepper. The wealthy kept large stores of pepper in their houses, and let it be known that it was there: it was a guarantee of solvency.” ~ Waverley Root
- “The medieval Church believed that the resurrection of Christ marked a new time for all of humanity.” ~ Timothy Radcliffe
- “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.” ~ Thomas Huxley
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“A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.” ~ Vince Lombardi
- “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
- “Krakow is one of my favorite places on earth. It is a medieval city full of young people. A wonderful, striking combination.” ~ Jonathan Carroll
- “We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.” ~ E. O. Wilson
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“To the medieval mind, the possibility of doubt did not exist.” ~ William Manchester
- “Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day.” ~ Wilhelm Dilthey
- “That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries, in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.” ~ Susan Vreeland , Medieval quotes life
- “In most cases, obviously, soldiers fought because a government drafted them and gave them a rifle. At every point too, we see the role of nationalistic sentiment, commercial rivalries, and simple greed. But can we ever separate out such motives from the religious? Was that not also true of the medieval crusades?” ~ Philip Jenkins
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“Every man should arm himself as quickly as he could, and come to the King.” ~ Charles William Chadwick Oman
- “There was a time in medieval England when they had wandering minstrels … A wandering minstrel would have been Frank Sinatra’s counterpart had he lived during the time of Henry II in 1190 or 1180.” ~ Frank Sinatra, Jr.
- “Satire must always accompany any free society. It is an absolute necessity. Even in the most repressive medieval kingdoms, they understood the need for the court jester, the one soul allowed to tell the truth through laughter.” ~ Joe Randazzo”I think it modern society as a whole, but definitively in Brazil, spaces are so well divided and there are so many barriers, and so many divisions, so many lines and so many borderlines, basically telling you that you should be here but not here. This is my space and this is your space, and this is expressed very dramatically in architecture, we have a very kind of aggressive, almost medieval concept for architecture, which is basically keeping people out. So you get high walls, fences, and electric fences, and divisions like that.” ~ Kleber Mendonca Filho
- “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
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“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
- “The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and devices upon which the holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “The pressure to make public retractions of past statements – there’s something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to ‘retract’ what you’ve said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.” ~ Milan Kundera
- “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 , Love medieval quotes
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“The ultimate binding element in the medieval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly representatives, notably the pope.” ~ Irving Babbitt
- “Ah. Medieval-style ransom.” Toot looked confused. “He did run some, but I stopped him, my lord. Like, just now. In front of you. Right over there.” There were several conspicuous sounds behind me, the loudest from my apprentice, and I turned to eye everyone else. They were all either covering smiles or holding them back— poorly. “Hey, peanut gallery,” I said. “This isn’t as easy as I’m making it look.” “You’re doing fine,” Karrin said, her eyes twinkling. I sighed. “Come on, Toot,” I said, and walked over to Hook.” ~ Jim Butcher
- “In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.” ~ Umberto Eco
- “I read a lot of poetry. All types of poetry, but mostly Catalan poetry, because I believe poetry is the essence of language. Reading the classics, be they medieval or contemporary, gives me a stylistic energy that I’m very interested in.” ~ Jaume Cabre
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“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
- “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
- “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.” ~ Tadao Ando
- “Leonardo da Vinci did not take received wisdom – whether from ancient classical thinkers or medieval scholars or from the Bible – without questioning it. And this was the beginning of the scientific method. This is another lesson for our time: that when we have evidence that contradicts a certain belief, we should be willing to change it. I think this made Leonardo, in some ways, a person who better understood the beauty of God’s creation than a person who just takes all received wisdom from the Bible on faith.” ~ Walter Isaacson , Beauty medieval quotes
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“There are some examples of medieval kings who were terrible human beings but were nevertheless good kings.” ~ George R. R. Martin
- “The medieval ideas of the “wildwood” was like a cupboard into which they stuffed everything they were afraid of – Wodwose, Green Men, demons, strange creatures – and of course the most fearful thing of all- wild women and their sexuality!” ~ John Matthews
- “The judgement makes no sense at all. It exposes the country, Turkey, to ridicule. It would have been so much better if Ahmet Davotgulu had behaved like a medieval jester, but no such luck for poor Turkey. Its Prime Minister is not taken seriously by too many people.” ~ Tariq Ali
- “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.” ~ Avril Lavigne
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“Adam Smith actually took all his best ideas and lines from sources from medieval Persia. But one thing he doesn’t take is the underlying assumption they have that the basis of a market is mutual aid.” ~ David Graeber
- “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.” ~ George R. R. Martin
- “Television is the Antichrist, and I can assure you after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to medieval savagery and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb…it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that.” ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- “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.” ~ Terry Pratchett
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“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
- “Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple… Real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with… My people who are trying to rule don’t have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king.” ~ George R. R. Martin
- “The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.” ~ Willard Van Orman Quine
- “The Christos-image
is most difficult to disentangle
from its art-craft junk-shop
paint-and-plaster medieval jumble
of pain-worship and death-symbol.” ~ Hilda Doolittle -
“I was trained as a political scientist and the profession bores me, to be frank. I am truly bored by mainstream work in my discipline, which strikes me as a kind of medieval scholasticism of a special kind.” ~ James C. Scott
- “In all times and in all places–in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France,Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden–the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue–that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society’s ideals.” ~ Louise J. Kaplan
- “There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.” ~ Hector Hugh Munro
- “Travelling, gentlemen, is medieval, today we have means of communication, not to speak of tomorrow and the day after, means of communication that bring the world into our homes, to travel from one place to another is atavistic.” ~ Max Frisch
- “Adolescence has been recognised as a stage of human development since medieval times–long, long before the industrial revolution–and, as it is now, has long been seen as a phase which centers on the fusion of sexual and social maturity. Indeed, adolescence as a concept has as long a history as that of puberty, which is sometimes considered more concrete, and hence much easier to name and to recognize.” ~ Terri E Apter
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“Pointe shoes are torture devices. I mean, ballerinas get used to it, but it was definitely a new experience for me. They feel medieval. I was very happy to stop wearing them.” ~ Natalie Portman
- “We cannot wholly rely, as though it were Medieval times, [on the notion that] the only reality is what we see in front of us. There are germs. There are changes that are happening in our planet’s ecology that are happening over such a long period of time that we cannot see the changes.” ~ John Hodgman
- “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.” ~ Grimes
- “Without criticism of Islam, Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. It will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” ~ Wafa Sultan
- “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
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“We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back.” ~ James Randi
- “Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods, appear to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick.” ~ Vladimir Nabokov
- “There are really only two stories the coal industry tells: “Coal keeps the lights on, and by implication, you’ll live in medieval, soul-shattering darkness if you don’t let us do whatever the hell we want with the landscape and drinking water you public health, because there’s no alternative.”” ~ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
- “When you have people that are cutting Christians’ heads off, when you have a world that the border and at so many places, that it is medieval times, we’ve never – it almost has to be as bad as it ever was in terms of the violence and the horror, we don’t have time for tone. We have to go out and get the job done.” ~ Donald Trump
- “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
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“I am not in any way opposed to medieval studies (or for that matter Latin).” ~ Charles Clarke
- “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
- “The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress … history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.” ~ Gao Xingjian , War medieval quotes
- “There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole human history to date: from prehistoric societies it took primitivism; from the Ancient world it took slavery; from medieval society brutal domination; from capitalism exploitation; and from socialism the name.” ~ Slavoj Žižek
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“Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.” ~ Ian Hacking
- “September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.” ~ Martin Amis
- “Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.” ~ Marshall McLuhan
