Middle Ages Quotes - Page 3

• I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes and places qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror for which there was no external evidence visible or plausible to others. My world was peopled with mysteries, seductive hints, vague menaces, "intimations of immortality.

  George F. Kennan

  Seductive, Childhood, Promise

  GEORGE F. KENNAN (1967). “MEMOIRS 1925-1950”

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• In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today, there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trades and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of the trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day.

  Fred Rodell

  Running, Jealous, Men

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• Now the code of life of the High Middle Ages said something entirely opposite to this: that it was precisely lack of leisure, an inability to be at leisure, that went together with idleness; that the restlessness of work-for-work's sake arose from nothing other than idleness. There is a curious connection in the fact that the restlessness of a self-destructive work-fanatacism should take its rise from the absence of a will to accomplish something.

  Josef Pieper

  Self, Opposites, Age

  "Leisure, the Basis of Culture" by Josef Pieper, translated by Gerald Malsbary, South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, (p. 27), 1998.

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• My mother had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never even imagined at a younger age.

  Gail Sheehy

  Mother, Age, Way

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• It was in 1590--winter. Austria was far away from the world, and asleep; it was still the Middle Ages in Austria, and promised to remain so forever. Some even set it away back centuries upon centuries and said that by the mental and spiritual clock it was still the Age of Belief in Austria. But they meant it as a compliment, not a slur, and it was so taken, and we were all proud of it. I remember it well, although I was only a boy; and I remember, too, the pleasure it gave me.

  Mark Twain

  Spiritual, Book, Taken

  Mark Twain (2015). “The Mysterious Stranger”, Mark Twain

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• If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the "bourgeois" under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.

  Peter Drucker

  Knights, Age, Embodiment

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• Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

  George Santayana

  Writing, Adventure, Young Friends

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• For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Growth, Age, Doe

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• The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead. ... But in the middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Pain, Doubt, Growth

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• My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.

  Ellen Goodman

  Fitness, Stress, Guilt

  Ellen Goodman (1990). “Making Sense”, Penguin Group USA

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• A man's diary is a record in youth of his sentiments, in middle age of his actions, in old age of his reflections.

  John Quincy Adams

  Reflection, Men, Age

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• Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhineland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Education, College, Men

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• Under the old philosophy which had governed the high Middle Ages things had been everywhere towards a condition of Society in which property was well distributed throughout the community, and thus the family rendered independent.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Philosophy, Independent, Community

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.84, TAN Books

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• By May, 1st, 1937, there should not be one single church left within the borders of Soviet Russia, and the idea of God will have been banished from the Soviet Union as a remnant of the Middle Ages, which has been used for the purpose of oppressing the working classes.

  Joseph Stalin

  Russia, Class, Ideas

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• we middle-aged folk have the education of life, truly; we know the multiplication table of anxieties and sorrows, the subtraction table of loss, the division table of responsibility.

  Margaret Deland

  Responsibility, Loss, Anxiety

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• And what, for instance, would have happened had Romeo and Juliet lived to middle age, their silhouettes broadened by pasta?

  Anita Loos

  Age, Pasta, Silhouettes

  Anita Loos, Ray Pierre Corsini (1985). “Fate keeps on happening: adventures of Lorelei Lee and other writings”

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• The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Years, Ideas, Humanity

  "A Distant Mirror". Book by Barbara Tuchman, p. 581, 1978.

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• That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Age, Problem, Conflict

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century”, p.6, Random House

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• Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities - in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.

  Nancy Pearcey

  Paris, Cambridge University, Oxford

  "America Will Never Be Free Until the Last Liberal Is Strangled in the Entrails of the Last Bureaucrat". www.pearceyreport.com. November 12, 2010.

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• I saw in 'the wandering Jew' the personification of the Jewish people, exiled in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, they are once again extremely rich, owing to their unfailing rude greediness and their indefatigable activity. With their hard-heartedness that they extend toward people of other faiths and races they are at the point of making themselves kings of the world. This people can thank its obstinacy that France will be Judized within fifty years. Already some wise Jews prophesy this frankly.

  George Sand

  Wise, Kings, Race

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• In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.

  P. D. James

  Reality, Risk, Age

  P. D. James (2011). “Devices and Desires”, p.211, Vintage

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• As to writing another book on geometry [to replace Euclid] the middle ages would have as soon thought of composing another New Testament.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Book, Writing, Science

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• Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Years, Age, Texture

  "Peter Ackroyd: 'Rioting has been a London tradition for centuries'". The Monday Interview with Andy McSmith, www.independent.co.uk. August 21, 2011.

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• In the absence of evidence, superstition. It's a Middle Ages thing. That's my theory anyway.

  Tucker Carlson

  Age, Superstitions, Absence

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• I'm not making films for middle aged journalists, who are mostly men. I make films that hopefully entertain people, where they can learn something about life.

  Nigel Cole

  Men, People, Film

  "Ladies Man: 'Made in Dagenham' Director Nigel Cole". Interview with Nigel M. Smith, www.indiewire.com. November 15, 2010.

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