Middle Ages Quotes

People who are always praising the past And especially the time of faith as best Ought to go and live in the Middle Ages And be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.

Our knowledge will take its revenge on us, just as ignorance exacted its revenge during the Middle Ages.

When you approach middle age, lots of stuff happens. Your body is aging, you're watching people around you get sick, you're watching people die, your mortality becomes very present at that point in your life.

We cannot hand our faith to one another.... Even in the Middle Ages, when faith was theoretically uniform, it was always practically individual.

When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

Spiritual sloth, or acedia, was known as The Sin of the Middle Ages. It's the sin of my middle age, too.

We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.

Middle age is when you get in the car and immediately change the radio station.

The middle years of life come on like thunder.

Middle age is when you realize that you'll never live long enough to try all the recipes you spent thirty years clipping out of newspapers and magazines.

Programming is how we talk to the machines that are increasingly woven into our lives. If you aren't a programmer, you're like one of the unlettered people of the Middle Ages who were told what to think by the literate priesthood. We had a Renaissance when more people could read and write; we'll have another one when everyone programs.

It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.

Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending; a negligent youth is usually attended by an ignorant middle age, and both by an empty old age.

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.

I'm my age and I feel glorious.

By the proper intakes of vitamins and other nutrients and by following a few other healthful practices from youth or middle age on, you can, I believe, extend your life and years of well-being by twenty-five or even thirty-five years.

You also said in Rolling Stone that your look is based on mine. The look I chose, I chose on purpose at a time when my record company were encouraging me to do what you have done. I felt I would rather be judged on my talent and not my looks. I am happy that I made that choice, not least because I do not find myself on the proverbial rag heap now that I am almost 47 yrs of age.. which unfortunately many female artists who have based their image around their sexuality, end up on when they reach middle age.

When I was a kid I respected authority, then as a teenager I gave none; in middle age I expected it; now in old age I live by the word.

But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him.

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

But I'll never see any of those fish," said Maxie."Or those whales. Or any lions or tigers. I'm never going to set foot in a rain forest now, am I? I won't even be able to watch old DVD's about them without electricity. What does the future hold? It's like going back to the middle ages. Nobody knowing what was going on beyond their front doorstep. All I'll ever know is this. This little bit of London.

Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

This (Vietnam) was a land of rebellious barons. It was like Europe in the Middle Ages. But what were the Americans doing here? Columbus had not yet discovered their country.

In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.

We thought of universities as the cathedrals of the modern world. In the middle ages, the cathedral was the center and symbol of the city. In the modern world, its place could be taken by the university.

I’m 59 and people call me middle aged. How many 118 year old men do you know?

I like my buddies from west Texas. I liked them when I was young; I liked them when I was middle-age; I liked them before I was President; and I like them during President; and I like them after President.

Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places.

[My father] had a massive middle-age breakdown. And left the family. And then it just completely fell apart. And my mother was heartbroken, just completely devastated. To make ends meet we started selling off all our possessions.

Like the priestly cult of the Middle Ages, the modern priestly cult of "scientific" psychotherapists exist overwhelmingly to stultify or blunt a too-acute insight into the powers benumbed in our personalities by our prevailing culture.

Middle age is when you go to bed at night and hope you feel better in the morning. Old age is when you go to bed at night and hope you wake up in the morning.

I guess, as a conductor, one goes in and out of fashion. Your career starts with a bang, everyone thinks you're wonderful, and then with middle age, something happens and you go into the wilderness.

Your best work involves timing. If someone wrote the best hip hop song of all time in the Middle Ages, he had bad timing.

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.

The secret of life is to let every segment of it produce its own yield at its own pace. Every period has something new to teach us. The harvest of youth is achievement; the harvest of middle-age is perspective; the harvest of age is wisdom; the harvest of life is serenity.

Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.

The Great Recession is not imaginary, and the effects loom large. There was an article in the NYT about the galloping death rate among white men in middle age. Higher than among any other demographic, etc. Mostly death by drugs, alcohol, or suicide. Many of them rural. My feeling is that it's many people who haven't been able to get back into the work force. Reg Morse is an example of the problem.

Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love.

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.

There is one bit of advice given us by the ancient Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest; and lending money at interest - what we call investment - is the basis of our whole system.

Someone once said that middle age is like rereading a book that you haven't read since you were a callow youth. The first time around you were dazzled by impressions, emotions, and tended to miss the finer points. In middle age you have the equipment to see the subtleties you missed before and you savor it more slowly.

He exhibits the most extraordinary capacity for middle age that I've ever encountered in a young man of twenty-four.

The first indication of menopause is a broken thermostat. It's either that or your weight. In any case, if you don't do something, you could be dead by August. God, middle age is an unending insult.

Clyde Phillip Wachsberger's delightful memoir about tending beds of flowers as compensation for a lonely middle age only to find unexpected romance along the way is a sweet reminder that, as he puts it, 'anything can happen in a garden.' In prose that balances candor with perfect courtesy, he charms us with the message that keeping a garden with a beloved companion, this most ephemeral of all the arts, can bring us the most enduring joys and pleasures.

If the men of the Middle Ages... lived in filth and discomfort, it was not for any lack of ability to change their mode of life; it was because they chose to live this way, because filth and discomfort fitted in with their principles and prejudices, political, moral, and religious.... It was in the power of medieval... craftsmen to create armchairs and sofas that might have rivaled in comfort those of today

Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.

Middle age occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net.

In the Middle Ages people took potions for their ailments. In the 19th century they took snake oil. Citizens of today's shiny, technological age are too modern for that. They take antioxidants and extract of cactus instead.