Best 138 quotes in «medieval quotes» category

The death of a loved one is a terrible thing. Even more terrible is the death of the only dear person; the one who shares your every breath. But the worst thing is when the loved one is slowly dying before your very eyes; when you see and understand everything but cannot help him; when you are prepared to give up your life for his, but they won't take it.

The death of a loved one is a terrible thing. Even more terrible is the death of the only dear person; the one who shares your every breath.

The modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration; and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them; such as reverence or the error of the Atheist heresy. And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not really thought out their idea of property.

The world is an ambitious business. It continuously expands and evolves. But people are lazy and God is far too lovely to do something about it.

Then you are no longer afraid of death, Your Majesty?” the lady asked, awed at the queen’s adventures. “No, I am no longer afraid of life.

The question of the religious significance of that change of emphasis, and of the validity of the intellectual processes by which Luther reached his conclusions, is one for theologians. Its effects on social theory were staggering. Since salvation is bestowed by the operation of grace in the heart and by that alone, the whole fabric of organized religion, which had mediated between the individual soul and its Maker--divinely commissioned hierarchy, systematized activities, corporate institutions--drops away, as the blasphemous trivialities of a religion of works. The medieval conception of the social order, which had regarded it as a highly articulated organism of members contributing in their different degrees to a spiritual purpose, was shattered and differences which had been distinctions within a larger unity were now set in irreconcilable antagonism to each other. Grace no longer completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man’s actions as a member of society were no longer the extension of his life as a child of God; they were its negation. Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a religious significance; they might compete with religion, but they could not enrich it. Detailed rules of conduct-- a Christian casuistry--are needless or objectionable; the Christian has a sufficient guide in the Bible and in his own conscience. In one sense, the distinction between the secular and the religious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secularized; all men sood henceforward on the same footing towards God; and that advance, which contead the germ of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous that all else seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction became more profound than ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone which could partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The division between them was absolute; no human effort could span the chasm.

The wiry man scratched his head, looked the two inquisitors up and down and cleared his throat softly. “We must be quick.” He turned to go, pulling his cloak over his head and shuffling through the door into the moonlight. The two inquisitors moved with impossible silence behind, floating across the straw-covered floor like the cats on the walls outside the hut. The cats froze at the disturbance before scurrying noiselessly into the shadows as the three silhouettes crossed the ten yards of grass before the blackness of the forest swallowed them. No fires flickered at this time, when the full moon was highest in the cloudless summer sky, and the three were the only waking souls in the hamlet.

The world eclipses and it’s just her and him. No it’s just her eyes and his soul. Her eyes expose and violate him, she turns him inside out. Then, her eyes drop him like a boring toy.

There are some for whom the good of mankind is their primary concern, and others who basically put their own considerations before everyone else. I was among the latter.

These men were not servants, but masters; not the agents of community, but seekers after divine love and wisdom. They undertook their work with high consecration. And the academy or the university was a place consecrated to the apprehension of an order more than human and a duty more than mundane.

The sky was dark and cold as she longed for the one man who could chase away the demons of the night.

The whole appeal of medieval studies - the language, the literature, the history, the art and architecture - to immerse oneself in that world. That other world. Safely other. Other in almost every way, except that it was here. Look at those fields on either side of the motorway. Those low hills. It was here. They were here, as we are here now. And this too shall pass. We don't actually believe that, though, do we? We are unable to believe that our own world will pass. So it will go on for ever? No. It will turn into something else. Slowly - too slowly to be perceived by the people living in it. Which is already happening, is always happening. We just can't see it.

They were ancient history. They were so ancient they made ancient history look modern. Well, okay . . . maybe medieval.

Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!

This is a smashing place, isn't it? But I must say it scares me a bit. Do you suppose one dares to ask for tea?' 'I expect so, though heaven knows how. Perhaps you blow a peal on a slughorn, or beat on your shield with your sword -- or, I'll tell you what, if you look around you'll find a long embroidered tassel, and if you pull it you'll hear a bell clanging hollowly in some dark corridor a million miles away, and then some bent old servitor will come shuffling in--' 'There's a telephone by the bed,' said Timothy. 'Good heavens, so there is. How disappointing.

Under the sanctuary are the catacombs where the dead wait for resurrection. The living do not venture there. The caverns here underneath the Sanctuary are illuminated only by dim shafts of light from the sanctuary. The walls are etched with flowers of frost, but at least I am out of the wind. Dark bays line the hall in front of me, a vast rabbit warren, each hold filled to the brim with the scent of the past.

Toward the middle of the fifteenth century a sizable group of German painters and printmakers reacted against the lingering influence of the so-called international or soft style--supple in form and idyllic in temperament--and adopted a new, sometimes brutal realism. In a few cases, as with Konrad Witz, the new style took the form of an unprecedented concern with presenting solid, blocky figures in simple, well-defined spaces. In the work of other artists such as the Master of the Karlsruhe Passion, the Master of the Erfurt Regler Altar, and Hans Multscher, the new style was characterized by expressionistic tendencies: intentional coarseness of form and ugly, uncouth and often dwarflike figure types.

Unfortunately, the world does not always act in a manner consistent with one's plans for it.

Those who long for perfection will never achieve it, while those who expect failure are always surprised.

Thus Arthur achieved the adventure of the sword that day and entered into his birthright of royalty. Wherefore, may God grant His Grace unto you all that ye too may likewise succeed in your undertakings. For any man may be a king in that life in which he is placed if so he may draw forth the sword of success from out of the iron of circumstance. Wherefore when your time of assay cometh, I do hope it may be with you as it was with Arthur that day, and that ye too may achieve success with entire satisfaction unto yourself and to your great glory and perfect happiness.

Vuestra alma está dividida entre el corazón y la espada. No imagino nada más difícil para un guerrero entregado como vos que amar hasta el límite, el deber tanto como a una mujer. No os envidio. Cualquier elección os hará infeliz. A ambos." Sueños El corazón & la espada I

Waiting for one’s execution is worse than dying. To seek my beheading is glory. Who went to his execution willingly? Jesus did. Jesus even dragged his cross half way to Golgotha. I think he would have nailed himself to the cross if he had to.

Wake up! You’re a sacred soul and glory is yours for the taking.

Whatever befalls us, we will endure it together. I clutch my longbow and dagger close to my side. My last thoughts linger on my husband and my boy. I will not let harm come to either of them.

When, during and after the Reformation, the universities lost their status as so many autonomous parts of the universal church, they lost their independence correspondingly. In Protestant Europe, they came under the jurisdiction of the national churches and of the rapacious national monarchies; in Catholic Europe --although to a lesser extent--they came under the jurisdiction of the reinvigorated and consolidated Papacy, and of the sovereigns who, as in Spain and France, made royal influence over the church establishment within their realms a condition of their support for the Roman cause. The dissolution of medieval universalism meant that learning, like nearly everything else, was forced to submit to new or more rigid denominations. With the complete or partial secularization of society which followed upon the French Revolutionary era, in nearly every country except Britain, the universities were stripped of what remained of their old rights and became little better than state corporations.

What kind of person do you wish to be? A part of those who take action, who try the hardest, or of those who go with the flow?

You are not blamed for your unwilling ignorance, but because you fail to ask about what you do not know.... For no one is prevented from leaving behind the disadvantage of ignorance and seeking the advantage of knowledge.

You change the world, but the world changes you, too. There’s no getting around it. I have to survive here, no matter what it costs me.

But no, I don't think I'm particularly drawn to the period roles or the medieval roles.

You have to hold on and be patient. Pain lasts for a while, but you must leave room for happiness when you find it.

You know better than me that there are people who serve God and those who serve only their own selves.

Young knight learn to love God and revere women so that your honour grows. Practice knighthood and learn the Art that dignifies you, and brings you honour in wars. Wrestle well and wield lance, spear, sword and dagger manfully, whose use in others’ hands is wasted. Strike bravely and hard there!

Youth believes itself immortal. There is a cure for such an attitude, but unfortunately it is a cure from which one never recovers.

Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

You tug and strain like a young horse when it's first tied up at the stake, whenever you are tied by your heartstrings.

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.

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'

We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back.

Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too.

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.

Sorry. I'm not, like, medieval torture expert guy.

I've always been interested in a lot of the medieval art portraying people being tormented.

The 'gallows' are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism.

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.

To the medieval mind the possibility of doubt did not exist.

A modern woman sees a piece of linen, but the mediaeval woman saw through it to the flax fields, she smelt the reek of the retting ponds, she felt the hard rasp of the hackling, and she saw the soft sheen of the glossy flax. Man did not see 'just leather', he saw the beast - perhaps one of his own - and knew the effort of slaughtering, liming and curing. Communities were smaller and whether our man lived on the outskirts of some feudal system, had escaped from it, or was entirely isolated, he would work alone, or daily with the same fellow-workers - conversation would soon languish. But THINK he must.

We are living in modern times throughout the world and yet are dominated by medieval minds.

A Cristandade fez renascer as fortunas da Europa medieval (derrotada e destruída pelos bárbaros) criando a sociedade mais avançada, moral, científica e artisticamente, do planeta. Os laicistas modernos, pelo contrário, chuparam a Europa até ao tutano, para depois a humilharem e venderem aos deuses do dinheiro.

Ah, life in medieval times! Yeah, we only have to worry about losing our heads every day.

All people are, at heart, egocentric. We exist at the center of our own little universes. We believe that we are living out our lives as best we can, and that we have our own sphere of influence which exists of both friends and enemies. They in turn have their own friends and enemies with whom they interact. That is a given. But we, each of us, tend to put ourselves ahead of others because we believe that we are significant. We must attend to our own needs, desires, wants, and aspirations, because each of us is our own greatest priority. No one else cares for us as much as we do, no one else can exist in our skin. We think we're important. It is where our sense of self-worth comes up, where our egos reside, where "we" are. And we believe that each of our lives means something.