Quotes About Middle Ages

They went in a spirit of scientific enquiry, but they could not quite manage to be open-minded; for once on the mountain, strange fears began to assail them. Behind their bravely rational and humanist front, they were still men of the Middle Ages, and their climb became a metaphor for the struggle of Renaissance Europe to get past old ghosts.

We reserve the term 'genius' for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term 'genius' was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling.

On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is the measure of what spirit there is. [...] In antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages there was an awareness of this longing for solitude and a respect for what it means; whereas in the constant sociality of our day we shrink from solitude to the point (what a capital epigram!) that no use for it is known other than as a punishment for criminals.

The theory of price in the Talmud and the Codes in so far as it affected trade between Jew and Jew, is exactly parallel to the scholastic doctrine of justum pretium which was prevalent in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. But as between Jew and non-Jew, there was no just price. Price was formed, as it is today, by the "higgling of the market.

The predatory barons, kings, and princelings of the Middle Ages had bred a swarm of rulers with the political ethics of highway robbers and, for the most part, the intellects of stable boys.

When I rather guiltily read the books on which the TV series 'Game Of Thrones' is based, I was struck by one thing. The whole point of this saga is that ruthlessness pays, that evil generally wins, that justice is non-existent, and utter cynicism the only wisdom. It is the Middle Ages without the saving grace of Christianity.

The European Middle Ages collected innovations from all over the world, especially from China, and built them into a new unity which formed the basis of our modern civilization.

But no values are effective, in a person or a society, except as there exists in the person the prior capacity to do the valuing, that is, the capacity actively to choose and affirm the values by which he lives. This the individual must do, and in this way he will help lay the groundwork for the new constructive society which will eventually come out of this disturbed time, as the Renaissance came out of the disintegration of the Middle Ages.

We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness.

The middle ages showed us the results of thinking without experimentation, our present century shows us what experimentation without thinking leads to.

approximately 1200 and 1600 that proved conducive for the emergence of the Scientific Revolution. Without the level that medieval natural philosophy attained, with its overwhelming emphasis on reason and analysis, and without the important questions that were first raised in the Middle Ages about other worlds, space, motion, the infinite, and without the kinds of answers they gave, we might, today, still be waiting for Galileo and Newton.

Col. Lloyd's plantation resembles what the baronial domains were during the middle ages in Europe. Grim, cold, and unapproachable by all genial influences from communities without, there it stands; full three hundred years behind the age

There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages.

Historians now agree that, relatively speaking, the years 1000 to 1300 in Europe—the period traditionally called the "High Middle Ages"—were prosperous and productive.

In the Middle Ages, as in Classical times, the academy possessed freedom unknown to other bodies and persons because the philosopher, the scholar, and the student were looked upon as men consecrated to the service of the Truth; and that Truth was not simply a purposeless groping after miscellaneous information , but a wisdom to be obtained, however imperfectly, from a teleological search.

I guess they didn't have those in the Middle Ages, did they? (Taryn) Middle Ages? Lady, you use very strange words. (Sparhawk) Yeah, okay, let me not tarry. I shall dress forthwith and hasten myself back to thee or thou or whatever it is. (Taryn) She's a strange demoiselle, but a highly amusing one. (Sparhawk)

Thus Scandinavian mythology was, with virtually no exception, written down by Christians, and there is no reason to believe that Christianity in Iceland was any different from Christianity anywhere else in western Europe during the High Middle Ages.

For the Christians of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, the gods would have had a place in historical time both through their euhemerization and through their presence in some of the lives of the saints translated from Latin into Icelandic. According to the notion of the euhemerization that prevailed in medieval Iceland, the gods were originally human beings who had emigrated from the Middle East (Tyrkland) to Scandinavia long ago.

In the Middle Ages it was a given that all animals and birds had a name relating to their kind. All cats, for example, were either Gylbert or Tybald (hence Tibbles); all sparrows were Philip. All redbreasts were Robin, and wrens were Jenny. And all monkeys were Robert. Still

All the same, Abelard opened the mind of the Middle Ages in new and startling ways. He gave the name of Aristotle and Aristotle's logic an edgy glamour it never entirely lost. Aristotle had said: All men desire to know. Abelard now added: All men need to question and doubt in order to know. These were important signposts for the future. For now, medieval civilization was about to swing down another path, one emblazoned by the Neoplatonist imagination.

If any single factor really doomed Aristotle as the Middle Ages had known him, and helped reformers like Martin Luther shove him to the sidelines, it was the invention of printing.

In 1210, it issued its first condemnation of Averroës and his disciples in the West; for good measure, it extended the ban to the works of Aristotle. It was already too late. Just fifteen years after the ban was issued, Aristotle's greatest medieval expositor was born. To his family and neighbors, he was Tommaso D'Aquino. To history, he is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the single greatest creative mind of the Middle Ages.

Understanding is the reward of faith," Saint Augustine says. "I believe, in order that I may understand" will be the catchphrase of the early Middle Ages. It is the summing-up of Augustine's final authoritative fusion of Neoplatonism and Christianity.

Greek science on Aristotle's terms, which had already fallen into decrepitude under the late Roman Empire, will take a long hiatus during the Middle Ages.