Quotes About Middle Ages

In short, the interaction between science and religion in the Middle Ages was not an abstract encounter between bodies of fixed ideas but part of the human quest for understanding. As such, it was characterized by the same vicissitudes and the same rich variety that mark all human endeavor.

Such was the transformation which had come over European society in the course of ten Christian centuries. Slavery had gone, and in its place had come that establishment of free possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. To-day, and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one, and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and brought into existence the Distributive State.

I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.

The radical elements in Islam are very dangerous. They want to achieve a return to the Islamic purity of the Middle Ages.

The sexual classification of ores and stones was maintained in the alchemical writings and lapidaries of the Middle Ages;

It is not surprising that the liberal arts were most assiduously cultivated in the Middle Ages than ever before or after. When theology is queen of the sciences, liberal education flourishes in her train.

There were no Middle Ages in America, dumb-o," said his sister. "White people hadn't gotten here yet. Only Europe had Middle Ages.

In my mind, if you went back to the Middle Ages, in Italy they'd be speaking Middle Age Italian. And at that point, it would obviously be indecipherable for us, but for the people of that time, it was just normal talking.

Persecutions of witches, erroneously associated with the Middle Ages, became widespread only during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

the verses were written no later than 39 B.C. and even as early as 42 B.C. — decades before the alleged birth of the biblical Jesus. The early church fathers wanted their followers to believe that the Prince of Peace the Roman poet referred to was Jesus of Nazareth, so the Middle Ages honored the poet as "St. Virgil," a lay prophet who had foreseen the coming of Christ.

Musically, there's a movement called the flatted fifth that's really evil-sounding. It was outlawed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. That movement is what gives you a real evil sound that conjures up dark, fantastic images. It's like an audio horror movie. It personifies what a horror movie is about.

In a few decades will we look upon the Nobel economics committee with the same smirk as when we look at the respected "scientific" establishments of the Middle Ages that promoted (against all observational evidence) the idea that the heart  was a center of heat? We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones.

The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

There are, broadly speaking, three directly analogous progressions inthe history of art: in Antiquity, from the blockiness of Egyptian art to the loose, painterly handling of Roman landscape frescoes; in the Middle Ages, from the tectonic emphasis of Ottonian art to the flamboyance of late Gothic; and in later times, from early Renaissance linearity to the sparkling web of light spun by the Rococo. The wheel turns full circle, but more rapidly each time.

Another deep philosophical issue, in principle relevant to thinking about international lending, surrounds the notion of "odious debt." In the Middle Ages, a child could be sent to debtors' prison if his parents died in debt. In principle, this allowed the parent to borrow more (because the punishment for failure to repay was so great), but today the social norms in most countries would view this transfer of debt as thoroughly unacceptable

'Simeon's Gift' is really - it's about a musician who - in the Middle Ages, who goes out to find his muse.

C'est au Moyen Âge, à la faveur d'un assez extraordinaire jeu de mots (malum signifiant à la fois le mal et la pomme en latin) que le fruit défendu du jardin d'Eden et croqué à belles dents par Adam et Eve, fut assimilé à une pomme.

How could so many people over hundreds of years tell such similar stories without some truth to the legend?" "A living corpse?" Raven's eyebrows shot up. "I don't know about the Middle Ages, but I'd notice if dead people started walking around, dragging off children." "There is that," Mikhail agreed.

In other words, to see if through these cultural phenomena a new Middle Ages is to take shape, a time of secular mystics, more inclined to monastic withdrawal than to civic participation. We should see how much, as antidote or as antistrophe, the old techniques of reason may apply, the arts of the Trivium, logic, dialectic, rhetoric. As we suspect that anyone who goes on stubbornly practicing them will be accused of impiety.

I know the present only through the television screen, whereas I have direct knowledge of the Middle Ages.

Life repeats Shakespearian themes more often than we think. Did Lady Macbeth, Richard III, and King Claudius exist only in the Middle Ages? Shylock wanted to cut a pound of flesh from the body of the merchant of Venice. Is that a fairy tale?

Two well-known French writers and thinkers, Françoise Giroud and Bernard-Henri Lévy, developed an entire book from a series of conversations concerning love, desire, seduction, jealousy, infidelity, marriage, and falling out of love. They discuss these themes using literary and historical references as well as personal observations and experiences. This type of discourse can trace its lineage back to the Courts of Love of the Middle Ages.

Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.