Best 138 quotes in «medieval quotes» category

Loose and forbear!

Men love those creatures that need to be taken care of. To be with a strong and wise woman is obliging. If you want to tame a lioness you need to become a lion, not a goat. A doe is easier to keep. You give her a little grass, a little milk, and she is tamed. Who do you think a man would choose?

micel walcan wolde we do from that daeg micel walcan in the great holt the brunnesweald but though we walced for wices months years though this holt becum ham to me for so long still we did not see efen a small part of it so great was this deop eald wud. so great was it that many things dwelt there what was not cnawan to man but only in tales and in dreams. wihts for sure the boar the wulf the fox efen the bera it was saed by sum made this holt their ham. col beorners and out laws was in here as they was in all wuds but deop deoper efen than this was the eald wihts what was in angland before men here i is meanan the aelfs and the dweorgs and ents who is of the holt who is the treows them selfs. my grandfather he telt me he had seen an aelf at dusc one daeg he seen it flittan betweon stoccs of treows thynne it was and grene and its eages was great and blaec and had no loc of man in them. well he was blithe to lif after that for oft it is saed that to see an aelf is to die for they sceots their aelf straels at thu and aelfscot is a slow death

My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common, when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill they have used us!

Nevertheless, there is a queer quality in that time [The Medieval Age]; which, while it was international was also internal and intimate. War, in the wide modern sense, is possible, not because more men disagree, but because more men agree.

... nada na geografia física ou humana, na economia ou na tradição das regiões que vieram a compor [o reino] determinava que se destacasse da restante Península o "rectângulo" que veio a construir-se como o reino mais ocidental da Europa.

No offense, Jaron, but I don't want your life. Even locked away behind closed doors I got a taste for how awful it can be." "Did anyone try to kill you while I was gone?" "No." "Then you didn't even get a taste.

Noblest. Bravest. What rot. There was no bravery in buying oneself out of difficulty.

My blood runs cold. Her savage stare and bloodied hands leave no doubts in my mind as she glares up at us from across the battlefield. This must be the fabled Queen of the Picts.

Nothing is truly real until one is willing to believe in it.

Once again I felt light-headed, but this time it wasn't from the scent of lilacs; it was from the scent of my own death.

Obsérvese la vileza de la carne humana. Da motivos para la humildad.

Perhaps the palms had been whispering warnings in the sultry breeze.

Only in this world of topsy-turvy attitudes could outright stupidity, such as I had displayed, be something that got me high marks. I had an amused glimmering of a notion at that point: If I ever turned out to be a complete and utter fool, I could wind up running the whole kingdom. It was something to consider.

Popatrz jeno. Kościół, karczma, bordel, a w środku między nimi kupa gówna. Oto parabola ludzkiego żywota.

[...] One chief difference between the medieval "scientist" and the scientist of to-day[1948] lies in the nature of the first principles accepted and in the attitude adopted toward them. The modern scientist has seen the breakdown of too many first principles to accept any as eternal truths. He proceeds inductively, building up slowly on the basis of observed facts. His attitude to his own (or at least to his brother's scientist) first principles is one of hesitation, even suspicion. He looks on them as "working hypotheses" to be modified or changed in the light of further experience. The older scientist, although he too realized that his function wa to explain facts, closed the door on fresh evidence too soon. The modern, at least in theory, keeps it always open. But there is a further and perhaps more interesting difference between them. The medieval thinker aimed at comprehensiveness. he seems not to be satisfied with anything short of the whole. The modern thinker is more modest and seeks the key not to the universe but to one group of facts within it. He likes to break problems up and resolve them bit by bit. He is not interested (that is professionally speaking) in the world as a whole, but only in one small corner of it. Herein lies the traditional distinction between "science" and "philosophy." both science and philosophy try to discover principles and interpret detail in their light; but whereas science tries to clear up small areas of the world, philosophy aims at the world as a whole. it stands in relation to the various sciences much as each science stands in relation to the various sciences much as each science stands in relation to its particular subject-matter. It is the science which seeks to reduce to the scientific unity and order the results of the various sciences. [...]

Puesto que la muerte no tiene remedio Mejor es que nos preparemos a morir Para que podamos vivir de muertos Timor Mortis conturbat me

Shadowed beneath his brow bone were cold dark eyes containing secrets and sadness, bitterness and grief.

She felt hot tears soaking his shirt as she began to sob. “Forgive you? What king asks forgiveness of a slave?” “Avin…” he gently pushed her away. “I have wronged you. Terribly.” “Yes,” she said sadly. “But we both know it cannot be reversed. Not now. To do so will only throw Windbourne back in turmoil.” She wiped away tears with the back of her hand and looked towards the window. “I can no longer love these people after what they did, but I can acknowledge that they have suffered enough. The long winter was not their fault, but neither was the lie that made them angry. And now simple people have been promised a humbled queen, and you must deliver.” He sighed. “It is too much to ask,” he said. “Then don’t.” Avin gave him the smallest, and saddest of smiles. “You are the king,” she said. “So train me.” The tears came then, and she softened in his arms. “Save me, Xander, lest I never feel again.” “I am sorry,” he said into her hair. “I am sorry I didn’t come. I am sorry I was not the one to kill your father for the hurt he caused you. I am sorry that I caused you even more. I should have known better. I should have never believed the worst.” He put his forehead against hers. “Let me make it better, my love.

Rooks have clustered on either side of the long road. It is as if they line a grand parade route for our passage. Their black feathers are stark as soot against the white road and the snow. They stab at the ground with their strange bare bills and gray unfeathered faces. The birds are like rough-edged black stones on a string around this stripped cold neck of road. The old books tell us rooks bring the virtuous dead to heaven’s gate.

She loves this man and he loves her, and that is the only thing that matters. Let them have their love, Jasper. Now, shut your pie hole. I have come to witness a wedding and I will not hear your voice again.

...she felt safe with Nicolo, and feared nothing.

she was like the merlin in pursuit of its airborne quarry, perhaps the snow bunting or a small meadow pipit; the avian prey is nimble but so is the predatory merlin with its inexhaustible stamina and unparalleled agility – round and round it chases the pipit, and the two flying at speeds almost impossible for the observer to follow.

Reason, you'll always be half-blind.

She would but be repaid by my taking her to wife, and that I could not grant her, for love cometh of the heart and mot by constraint.

So, as long as you can get enough to eat, and can avoid all the various lethal infections, the dangers of childbirth, lead poisoning, and the extreme violence, you should live a long time. All you have to worry about are the doctors.

So, apart from casting runes, what other hobbies do you have? Forbidden rituals, human sacrifices, torturing? –

Some people are destined to be a lighthouse for a lost comrade.

Sir Wystan,” Ryla stated. “You have come. Is the danger quite near?” “Not yet, little one, but it is always wise to be several steps ahead of it,” the old knight said gently.

Singing rose up from the convent, filling the woods with a peaceful echo that tried to penetrate her heart and smooth her features; but nothing could ease the pain of saying goodbye.

Soy mujer y escribo. Soy plebeya y sé leer. Nací sierva y soy libre.

Some time later, I sat in the wine cellar, staring at the walls while cradling a wineskin in my lap like a child, murmuring over and over as if lulling the child to sleep, 'I am shat upon. I am shat upon'.

Stars flicker above, points of bright ice in a dark river. I pull a heavy sheepskin around my legs and stretch my feet toward the fire. Despite the cold, Liam plays his flute, the sound whistling through the night. Soon my eyes are heavy, my head nodding.I open my eyes at the deep melodious baritone of Salvius’s voice telling a tale. Liam’s flute is silent now. I have heard Salvius tell many tales on market days; he is known for his memory of wandering minstrels and mummers who visit us at Whitsunday and through Midsummer. Salvius is a mockingbird: he can give a fair charade of the rhythmic tones of any wandering bard or any noble of the Royal Court.In this darkness, his eyes catch the light like a cat in the night.

The battered and pathetic thing that represented any claim to conscience I might have had turned away from me in disgust. Oddly, I couldn't blame it. I was disgusted myself. Disgusted at my weakness and my lack of resolution, at my refusal to see justice through in the name of the woman who had borne me.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

So that's how it was. Palaces, kings... and thugs like that, who, like locusts, move from one century to another.

Such a state of affairs feeds a man's pride. It flatters men, even more, when they see love and admiration in the eyes of a young woman.

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 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 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.

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.