Middle Ages Quotes

“There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.”
― Richard Lederer, Anguished English: An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language

“The day will come when you need them to respect you, even fear you a little. Laughter is poison to fear.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“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!”
― Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

“The hard truths are the ones to hold tight. - Old Bear”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“In the Middle Ages, cathedrals 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, Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“Margaret looked up at him from where she sat by the window.

"Oh, Brother Gregory, what's wrong with your hand"

"I'm just scratching it; it itches."

"Really, is it red?"

"No, it's just a bite. You gave me a flea."

"I don't have fleas, Brother Gregory," insisted Margaret.

"Everyone has fleas, Margaret. It's part of God's plan."

"I don't. I wash them off."

"Margaret, you haven't any sense at all. They just hop back. You can't wash enough to keep them off."

"I do."

"Aren't you afraid your skin will come off? It could, you know. That's much worse than fleas." Brother Gregory spoke with an air of absolute certainty.

"Everyone tells me that. It hasn't come off yet."

"Margaret, you're too hardheaded for your own good. Now take for your next sentence, 'Fleas do not wash off.'"

"Is this right?" She held up the tablet, and Brother Gregory shook his head in mock indignation.

"I despair of you, Margaret. Flea is not spelled with one e--it's spelled with two.”
― Judith Merkle Riley, A Vision of Light

“Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent.”
― Thomas Cahill, Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe

“Spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just”
― Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo

“What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?”
― H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay

“The fundamental challenge of ancient man was to be wise. The fundamental challenge of medieval man was to be holy. The fundamental challenge of modern man was to be effective. The fundamental challenge of contemporary man is not to be ridiculous.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“Two of the most famous Baghdadi scholars, the philosopher Al-Kindi and the mathematician Al-Khawarizmi, were certainly the most influential in transmitting Hindu numerals to the Muslim world. Both wrote books on the subject during al-Ma'mun's reign, and it was their work that was translated into Latin and transmitted to the West, thus introducing Europeans to the decimal system, which was known in the Middle Ages only as Arabic numerals. But it would be many centuries before it was widely accepted in Europe. One reason for this was sociological: decimal numbers were considered for a long time as symbols of the evil Muslim foe.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“How much easier it is to be poor than rich.”
― Lois Leveen, Juliet's Nurse

“Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages. No common identity in 1000 linked Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire (in what is now the Balkans, Greece and Turkey), except the very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together. There was no common European culture, and certainly not any Europe-wide economy. There was no sign whatsoever that Europe would, in a still rather distant future, develop economically and militarily, so as to be able to dominate the world. Anyone in 1000 looking for future industrialization would have put bets on the economy of Egypt, not of the Rhineland and Low Countries, and that of Lancashire would have seemed like a joke. In politico-military terms, the far south-east and south-west of Europe, Byzantium and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), provided the dominant states of the Continent, whereas in western Europe the Carolingian experiment (see below, Chapters 16 and 17) had ended with the break-up of Francia (modern France, Belgium and western Germany), the hegemonic polity for the previous four hundred years. The most coherent western state in 1000, southern England, was tiny. In fact, weak political systems dominated most of the Continent at the end of our period, and the active and aggressive political systems of later on in the Middle Ages were hardly visible.

National identities, too, were not widely prominent in 1000, even if one rejects the association between nationalism and modernity made in much contemporary scholarship.”
― Chris Wickham

“Agnes! Do you hear me? I was wrong. The world isn't ending. There are things that matter. We matter.”
― Julia Gfrörer, Laid Waste

“Some mediæval straw-splitting about the nature of the Trinity, which is only useful to-day to show how many things are unimportant to us, which once shook the world”
― W.B. Yeats, The Tables of the Law

“If you want to write a practical history of the Middle Ages, and to trace the real reasons of the things that actually happened, investigate first the history of the money; and then of the quarrels for office and territory.”
― John Ruskin, The Eagle's Nest

“The very people whose deaths were treated as entertainment for the masses would eventually come to rule over most of the lands that Rome had once conquered”
― Captivating History, Middle Ages: A Captivating Guide to the Dark Ages and Black Death

“Time and again in the Middle Ages, warrior-kings, seen by their men in the thick of fighting, turned the tide of battle, assuring victory.”
― Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

“In medieval Europe (and even colonial America) thousands of animals were summoned to court and put on trial for a variety of offenses, ranging from trespassing, thievery and vandalism to rape, assault and murder. The defendants included cats, dogs, cows, sheep, goats, slugs, swallows, oxen, horses, mules, donkeys, pigs, wolves, bears, bees, weevils, and termites. These tribunals were not show trials or strange festivals like Fools Day. The tribunals were taken seriously by both the courts and the
community.”
― Jason Hribal, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance

“Experiments in limiting reproduction to the undesirable classes were unconsciously made in mediæval Europe under the guidance of the church. After the fall of Rome social conditions were such that all those who loved a studious and quiet life were compelled to seek refuge from the violence of the times in monastic institutions and upon such the church imposed the obligation of celibacy and thus deprived the world of offspring from these desirable classes. In the Middle Ages, through persecution resulting in actual death, life imprisonment and banishment, the free thinking, progressive and intellectual elements were persistently eliminated over large areas, leaving the perpetuation of the race to be carried on by the brutal, the servile and the stupid. It is now impossible to say to what extent the Roman Church by these methods has impaired the brain capacity of Europe, but in Spain alone, for a period of over three centuries from the years 1471 to 1781, the Inquisition condemned to the stake or imprisonment an average of 1,000 persons annually. During these three centuries no less than 32,000 were burned alive and 291,000 were condemned to various terms of imprisonment and other penalties and 17,000 persons were burned in effigy, representing men who had died in prison or had fled the country. No better method of eliminating the genius producing strains of a nation could be devised and if such were its purpose the result was eminently satisfactory, as is demonstrated by the superstitious and unintelligent Spaniard of to-day. A similar elimination of brains and ability took place in northern Italy, in France and in the Low Countries, where hundreds of thousands of Huguenots were murdered or driven into exile.”
― Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History

“Also, historians will silently murder you with their
eyeballs if you say ‘Dark Ages’ unironically.”
― Greg Jenner

“By the standards of any age, this was a hot mess.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“History does not have to be made by nice people. In fact... it very rarely is.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“In attempting to become more civilized, we enter the Middle Ages.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Jerusalem is a city of unfinished projects.”
― Anthony Bale, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

“-No es fácil, Valtario... No lo es.
-Mi padre siempre decía que las cosas siempre son fáciles, y que lo difícil es convencerse de ello.
-Tu padre no fue rey.
-Podría haberlo sido. Cualquier noble godo puede serlo.
El silencio es ahora fuego. Ambos se miden con la mirada.”
― José Soto Chica

“Holy ground can look startlingly ordinary, especially when one’s standing on it.”
― Anthony Bale, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

“Ám より ám đạo にぞ nhập ぬべき dao に chiếu せ sơn の diệp の nguyệt”
― Izumi Shikibu

“Sometimes I reworked, with much crossing out and burning of papers; I had to sift through my thoughts for words that gleamed with truth. But other times the words came fast, and then I was an arrow, sprung from a bow in God's service.”
― Victoria Mackenzie, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain

“I pressed my hands into my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to stifle the memories. But they bled through. As if there had always been cracks in me meant for her -- then, when we had finally found each other, her soul somehow was broken in all the right places so that she fit inside me.”
― Rachelle Rea Cobb, The Sound of Silver