Middle Age Quotes

1. "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."
Author: Anaïs Nin

2. "The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are."
Author: Anne Lamott

3. "I keep sailing on in this middle passage. I am sailing into the wind and the dark. But I am doing my best to keep my boat steady and my sails full."
Author: Arthur Ashe

4. "New Rule: Churches have to stop ringing the damn bells. It was a good idea in the Middle Ages, but people have clocks now. It's not like you're doing us all a favor by keeping the hunchbacks off the street. Make up your mind, are you a house of worship or an ice cream truck?"
Author: Bill Maher

5. "Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century."
Author: C.S. Lewis

6. "Self-acceptance has been a blessed by-product of middle age."
Author: Candice Bergen

7. "The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

8. "They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal."
Author: Daphne Du Maurier

9. "Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is finished."
Author: Dario Fo

10. "Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay."
Author: David Mitchell

11. "All through my sixties I felt I was still within hailing distance of middle age, not safe on its shores, perhaps, but navigating its coastal waters. My seventieth birthday failed to change this because I managed scarcely to notice it, but my seventy-first did change it. Being 'over seventy' is being old: suddenly I was aground on that fact and saw that the time had come to size it up."
Author: Diana Athill

12. "My father was a middle manager at an oil company, but I never knew anything about his work. Whatever business acumen I have just got gleaned over the years."
Author: Donna Mills

13. "Mr. Herriton, don't – please, Mr. Herriton – a dentist. His father's a dentist." Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die."
Author: E.M. Forster

14. "The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of to-day have written it over the gates of this world. But if we are to understand the story which follows, we must erase that apocalyptic writing, if only for an hour. We must recreate the faith of our fathers, if only as an artistic atmosphere. If, then, you are a pessimist, in reading this story, forego for a little the pleasures of pessimism. Dream for one mad moment that the grass is green. Unlearn that sinister learning that you think is so clear, deny that deadly knowledge that you think you know. Surrender the very flower of your culture, give up the very jewel of your pride, abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

15. "To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it."
Author: Gustave Flaubert

16. "In the days of Moses and the prophets such a man would have been counted among the wise men of the land; in the Middle Ages he would have been burned at the stake."
Author: Hans Christian Andersen

17. "Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature."
Author: Harold Coffin

18. "Then again, I like the contrast between my lonely, loveless, hunted and thoroughly disorderly existence and this middle-class family life. I like to breathe in on the stairs this odour of quiet and order, of cleanliness and respectable domesticity. There is something in it that touches me in spite of my hatred for all it stands for. I like to step across the threshold of my room and leave it suddenly behind; to see, instead, cigar-ash and wine bottles among the heaped-up books and nothing but disorder and neglect; and where everything - books, manuscripts, thoughts - is marked and saturated with the plight of lonely men, with the problem of existence and with the yearning after a new orientation for an age that has lost its bearings."
Author: Hermann Hesse

19. "It was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage. Christian slaveholders treated their slaves as they did the cattle in their fields: they worked them, scourged them, mated them , parted them, and sold them at will. Abolition came with the decline in religious belief, and largely through the efforts of those who were denounced as heretics."
Author: Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

20. "The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change."
Author: J. G. Ballard

21. "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."
Author: Jim Al Khalili

22. "In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."
Author: John Edward Williams

23. "We were postwar middle-class white kids living in the slipstream of the greatest per-capita rise in income in the history of Western civilization; we were 'teen-agers' - a term, coined in 1941, that was in common usage a decade later - a new, recognizable franchise. We had money, mobility, and problems all our own."
Author: John Lahr

24. "During the Middle Ages they understood that words accompanied by imagery are much more memorable. By making the margins of a book colorful and beautiful, illuminations help make the text unforgettable. It's unfortunate that we've lost the art of illumination."
Author: Joshua Foer

25. "What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?"
Author: Justin Cronin

26. "In the early twelfth century century the Virgin had been the supreme protectress of civilisation. She had taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion. The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages were her dwelling places upon earth. In the Renaissance, while remaining the Queen of Heaven, she became also the human mother in whom everyone could recognise qualities of warmth and love and approachability...The stabilising, comprehensive religions of the world, the religions which penetrate to every part of a man's being--in Egypt, India or China--gave the female principle of creation at least as much importance as the male, and wouldn't have taken seriously a philosophy that failed to include them both...It's a curious fact that theall-male religions have produced no religious imagery--in most cases have positively forbidden it. The great religious art of the world is deeply involved with the female principle."
Author: Kenneth Clark

27. "We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the Clouds™ were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon from where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset, which was this brag red, and which hit on all these miles of muscle and made it flex and quiver, with all these shudders running across the top of it, and birds were flying over, crying kind of sad, maybe looking for garbage, and the whole thing, with the beef and the birds and the sky, it glowed like there was a light inside it, which it was time to show us now."
Author: M.T. Anderson

28. "Sam came around the side of the car and stopped dead when he saw me. "Oh my God, what is THAT?" I used my thumb and middle finger to flick the multicolored pom-pom on top of my head. "In my language, we call it a HAT. It keeps my ears warm." "Oh my God," Sam said again, and closed the distance between us. He cupped my face in his hands and studied me. "It's horribly cute." He kissed me, looked at the hat, and then he kissed me again. I vowed never to lose the pom-pom hat."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

29. "It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age."
Author: Margaret Mead

30. "Almost all my middle-aged and elderly acquaintances, including me, feel about 25, unless we haven't had our coffee, in which case we feel 107."
Author: Martha Beck

31. "The bibliographer in the digital age returns to the revelatory practice of her medieval forebears. Librarians, like those scribes of the Middle Ages, do not merely keep and classify texts; they create them, in the form of online finding aids, CD-ROM concordances, and other electronic texts, not to mention paper study guides and published bibliographies."
Author: Matthew Battles

32. "Back in middle school, Catherine and I had gone through this stage where all we would read were fantasy books. We'd consume them like M&M's, by the fistful, J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Brooks and Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander. Susan Boone looked, to me, like the queen of the elves (there's almost always an elf queen in fantasy books). I mean, she was shorter than me and had on a strange lineny outfit in pale blues and greens...."
Author: Meg Cabot

33. "He stares at the them, mid mouthful. 'Please,' he says, after he's swallowed. 'It's bad enough that the middle-aged are having sex, without thinking of my aunt doing it. And I don't know why someone just doesn't tell Sam to use a condom instead of impregnating the women of the inner-west."
Author: Melina Marchetta

34. "Like many middle-class Americans, especially those who are white and male, Iwas raised in a subculture that insisted I could do anything I wanted to do, beanything I wanted to be, if I were willing to make the effort. The message wasthat both the universe and I were without limits, given enough energy andcommitment on my part. God made things that way, and all I had to do was toget with the program. My troubles began, of course, when I started to slaminto my limitations, especially in the form of failure."
Author: Parker Palmer

35. "Too much thought is bad for the soul, for art, and for crime. It is also a sign of middle age."
Author: Patrick Hamilton

36. "On one hand she seems so agile, so athletic, and yet I've seen her appear so awkward that it embarrassed me. She gives the impression of a hard, worldly adroitness, and in some situations she's like an adolescent: rigid with ancient, middle class attitudes, unable to think for herself, falling back on old verities...victim of her family teaching, shocked by what shocks people, wanting what people usually want. She wants a home, a husband, and her idea of a husband is a man who earns a certain amount of money, helps around the garden, does the dishes...the idea of a good husband that's found in This Week magazine; a viewpoint from the most ordinary stratum, that great ubiquitous world of family life, transmitted from generation to generation. Despite her wild language."
Author: Philip K. Dick

37. "Isn't it enough to be middle-aged and impeccably beautiful? Why must one be economically useful?"
Author: Pietros Maneos

38. "Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming."
Author: Richard Russo

39. "Don't blame us," said my mother. "We didn't blow up half of Court, steal a dozen cars, call out a murderer in the middle of a crowd, or get our teenage friend crowned queen.""Actually," said Abe, "I did blow up half of Court."
Author: Richelle Mead

40. "He looked like those paintings of baby angels - what do you call them, hubbubs? No cherubs. That's it. He looked like a cherub who'd turned middle-aged in a trailer park."
Author: Rick Riordan

41. "He glanced around the reading room and closed his eyes, trying to keep hold of the past for a minute longer, a fattening and hungover middle-aged historian in a black corduroy suit."
Author: Robert Harris

42. "…. by the time they have reached the middle of their life's journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything's coming about as it has. It might just have well as turned out differently. The events of people's lives have, after all, only to the last degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them"
Author: Robert Musil

43. "Many people wake up in middle age with the realization that in their youthful romances and early marriages, they were drawn to precisely the kinds of partners they were trying to avoid. All too often we marry stand-ins for our alchoholic fathers, shadowy replacements for our angry mothers, surrogates with whom we try to work out our unfinished childhood dramas. Or we fall in love with someone who incarnates the virtues or vices opposite our own. An orderly man who plans his days marries a spontaneous woman who lets things lie where they fall, lives in the moment, and is perpetually late for appointments."
Author: Sam Keen

44. "Abraham Lincoln comes from nothing, has no education, no money, lives in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. And despite the fact that he suffers one tragedy and one setback after another, through sheer force of will, he becomes something extraordinary: not only the president but the person who almost single-handedly united the country."
Author: Seth Graham Smith

45. "My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead."
Author: Shirley Jackson

46. "Is Jason intelligent enough to realise that if you describe a thirty-eight-year-old woman as middle-aged, she's more likely to want to kill you than help you? Because Lauren isn't."
Author: Sophie Hannah

47. "Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, 'Why not?' and the other, 'Why bother?'"
Author: Sydney J. Harris

48. "I'm sorry to bang on about it because I know everyone is, but Bryan Cranston in 'Breaking Bad' is remarkable. To see him switch from 'Malcolm in the Middle' to suddenly become Walter White is incredible. It's a) nice to see an actor given that chance, and b) great to see him really take full advantage of it."
Author: Tom Mison

49. "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."
Author: Tom Robbins

50. "Both remembered how it all started, and even now, in the middle of my middle age, when I think of that shining young girl, I still feel a little thrill of first love, still there, still burning like a pilot light."
Author: William Landay

Middle Age Quotes Pictures