Medieval Motivational Quotes

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

I am whatever I need to be to survive. Roles are as interchangeable as clothes and there are enough fools out there for me to live a long and prosperous life. The role I’ll play next is that of executioner,” Rondo replied, grinning at each pause.

Although the ideal of celibacy was always put forward as a matter of high spirituality, the controlling motive for this purging of marriage from the priesthood [with the First Lateran Council, 1123] was economic. Through networks of monasteries and feudal fiefdoms, the Church was the largest landowner in Christendom — the territory described today as Western Europe. Celibate clergy, with no households to support, would lack the essential drive to accumulate wealth for themselves; nor would they produce legitimate heirs to lodge competing claims to the vast estates and treasures the medieval church was hell-bent on protecting and expanding.

Every age has its leitmotif, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age.

In the urban communities of medieval Europe, the success of merchants, traders, and artisans depended—in part—on their reputation for impartial honesty and fairness, and on their industriousness, patience, precision, and punctuality. These reputational systems favored the cultivation of the relevant social standards, attentional biases, and motivations that apply to impersonal transactions. I suspect these changes in both people’s psychology and society’s reputational standards are an important part of the rapidly rising availability of credit, which helped fuel the commercial revolution.57

What emerges here is that the rabbis, in dwelling as much as they did on the concerns of this world, were motivated by a vision that they constructed quite deliberately. They believed that the best hope for the Jewish people to overcome their dire circumstances was to engage in the world as it was, not to retreat from it. As we will see in the next chapter, that vision helped Jews survive not just up to the year 1000 but in the late medieval and early modern periods as well, and once the modern period arrived, the same vision prepared them to achieve immense success when they were invited to become part of Western society.

It is frequently urged that it is necessary to create a public feeling in favour of the full and unchecked mental development of women. Such an argument overlooks the fact that 'emancipation,' the 'woman question,' 'women's rights movements,' are no new things in history, but have always been with us, although with varying prominence at different times in history. It also largely exaggerates the difficulties men place in the way of the mental development of women, especially at the present time. Furthermore it neglects the fact that at the present time it is not the true woman who clamours for emancipation, but only the masculine type of woman, who misconstrues her own character and the motives that actuate her when she formulates her demands in the name of woman. As has been the case with every other movement in history, so also it has been with the contemporary woman's movement. Its originators were convinced that it was being put forward for the first time, and that such a thing had never been thought of before. They maintained that women had hitherto been held in bondage and enveloped in darkness by man, and that it was high time for her to assert herself and claim her natural rights. But the prototype of this movement, as of other movements, occurred in the earliest times. Ancient history and medieval times alike give us instances of women who, in social relations and intellectual matters, fought for such emancipation, and of male and female apologists of the female sex. It is totally erroneous to suggest that hitherto women have had no opportunity for the undisturbed development of their mental powers.

Many time-honored principles of classification clearly decreased in importance during the early modern period. In particular, the possibility of psychic conflict, especially that which could generate competing motives for action, had been a common device in ancient and medieval theories for distinguishing among passions, kinds of passions, and faculties of the soul in general. This principle played some role for Descartes in distinguishing between movements coming from the body and those originating in the soul, and it was deployed sporadically by other theorists. But the practice died out over the course of the two centuries, as theorists came to recognize the possibility that a single, or similar, emotional source might produce conflicting motions or tendencies, both in the individual and across societies. Indeed, some emotions were characterized exactly by such conflict or turbulence. Descartes's description of regret is one such example. A somewhat happier case is the emotions generated by tragedy, as explained by philosophers from Malebranche to Hume.

How could the crusaders be motivated by love and piety, considering all the brutal violence and bloodshed they committed? Not only is such a question anachronistic—violence was part and parcel of the medieval world—but centuries before Islam, Christian theologians had concluded that “the so called charity texts of the New Testament that preached passivism and forgiveness, not retaliation, were firmly defined as applying to the beliefs and behavior of the private person” and not the state, explains historian Christopher Tyerman. Christ himself distinguished between political and spiritual obligations (Matt. 22:21). He praised a Roman centurion without calling on him to “repent” by resigning from one of the most brutal militaries of history (Matt. 8: 5–13). When a group of soldiers asked John the Baptist how they should repent, he advised them always to be content with their army wages (Luke 3:14). Paul urged Christians to pray for “kings and all that are in authority” (1 Tim. 2:2). In short, “there was no intrinsic contradiction in a doctrine of personal, individual forgiveness condoning certain forms of necessary public violence to ensure the security in which, in St. Paul’s phrase, Christians ‘may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty’ (1 Tim. 2:2).”27 Or as that chief articulator of “Just War” theory, Saint Augustine (d. 430), concluded, “It is the injustice of the opposing side, that lays on the wise man the duty to wage war.

Many real-world Northwestern endonyms have European origins, such as “Portland,” “Victoria,” “Bellingham,” and “Richland.” To address this phenomenon while also contributing a sense of the fantastic, I chose to utilize a forgotten nineteenth century European artificial language as a source. Volapük is clumsy and awkward, but shares a relationship with English vocabulary (upon which it is based) that I was able to exploit. In my fictional universe, that relationship is swapped, and English (or rather, “Vendelabodish”) words derive from Volapük (“Valütapük”). This turns Volapük into an ancient Latin-like speech, offering texture to a fictional history of the colonizers of my fictional planets. Does one have to understand ancient Rome and medieval Europe and America’s Thirteen Colonies to understand the modern Pacific Northwest? Nah. But exploring the character and motivations of a migrating, imperial culture certainly sets the stage for explaining a modernist backlash against the atrocities that inevitably come with colonization.             The vocabulary of Volapük has also given flavor that is appropriate, I feel, to the quasi-North American setting. While high fantasy worlds seem to be built with pillars of European fairy tales, the universe of Geoduck Street is intentionally built with logs of North American tall tales. Tolkien could wax poetic about the aesthetic beauty of his Elvish words all he wanted, since aesthetic beauty fits the mold of fairies and shimmering palaces, but Geoduck Street needed a “whopper-spinning” approach to artificial language that would make a flapjack-eating Paul Bunyan proud. A prominent case in point: in this fictional universe, the word “yagalöp” forms the etymological root of “jackalope.” “Yag,” in the original nineteenth century iteration of Volapük, means “hunting,” while “löp” means “summit.” Combining them together makes them “the summit of hunting.” How could a jackalope not be a point of pride among hunting trophies?

Most early scientists were compelled to study the natural world because of their Christian worldview. In Science and the Modern World, British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead concludes that modern science developed primarily from “the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.” Modern science did not develop in a vacuum, but from forces largely propelled by Christianity. Not surprisingly, most early scientists were theists, including pioneers such as Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Johannes Kepler (1571– 1630), Blaise Pascal (1623–62), Robert Boyle (1627–91), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and Louis Pasteur (1822–95). For many of them, belief in God was the prime motivation for their investigation of the natural world. Bacon believed the natural world was full of mysteries God intended for us to explore. Kepler described his motivation for science: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.

Al-Askarî gives examples of the high esteem shown to scholars and the important position in society they occupy, often in spite of their lowly origins which ordinarily would not have allowed them to advance far beyond their fathers’ menial situations. Much more numerous, and more interesting, are the anecdotes and remarks on the diffi culties that must be overcome on the road to knowledge. He cites the statement concerning the six qualities needed: a penetrating mind, much time, ability, hard work, a skilful teacher, and desire (or, in the parlance of our own time, “motivation,” shahwah). On his own, he adds the very elementary need for “nature,” that is, an inherited physical endowment, such as Muslim philologians of al-Askarî’s type always claimed as essential for their intellectual pursuits. The search for knowledge must be unselfi sh. As the author repeats over and over again, it is a never ending process. Persistent study sharpens the natural faculties. The hunger for knowledge is never stilled, as proclaimed by traditions ascribed to the Prophet. Stationariness means ultimate failure, according to the widely quoted saying that “man does not cease knowing as long as he studies, but once he gives up studying, he is the most ignorant of men.” Constant travel in search of knowledge and regular attendance at the teacher’s lectures are mandatory. The prospect of learning something not known before should make a man forget his home and his family and endure all possible hardships, as illustrated by an anecdote about al-Asmaî. Scholars refrain at times from certain foods as too luxurious or as harmful to the powers of memory. They study all night long.

The Misbâh has chapters on “knowledge” (- ilm, ch. 62), “certain knowledge” ( yaqîn, ch. 88), “wisdom” (hikmah, ch. 99), and “ignorance” ( jahl, ch. 77). The chapters are spread over the whole, work seemingly without any clear motivation justifying their insertion in the particular places in which they are found. “Jafar” starts, of course, with the praise of knowledge as he does with the blame of ignorance whose progress is darkness42 and whose recession is light. He is concerned with clarifying the particular aspect of knowledge that is referred to in such common traditions as the search for knowledge being a duty, the search for knowledge to be extended even as far as China,43 and the knowledge about one’s soul being the knowledge of the Lord.44 In the first case, the knowledge intended is the knowledge of the fear of God and of certainty (- ilm at-taqwâ wa-l-yaqîn); in the sec- ond, the knowledge about (ma- rifah) the soul/self which includes the knowledge about the Lord; and in the third (where this last knowledge is particularly speci- ed), the knowledge that requires acting in accordance with it and which is “sincere devotion” (ikhlâs). The theme of the necessity of acting with sincere devotion is then elaborated by means of statements castigating useless knowledge and stressing the fact that just a small amount of knowledge supports a large amount of life-long work. An inscription found and deciphered by Jesus and a revelation received by David likewise indicate the need for action. “Knowledge” is the only way leading to God. The true “knower” is identi- ed by his prayers, his piety, and his actions, and not by his appearance, his pre- tensions, and his words. True knowledge has always been sought in the past by those possessing intelligence, devotion (nusk), modesty (bashful- ness, hayâ), and the fear of God (khashyah); today it is sought by men not possessing any of these qualities. Statements concerning the qualities required of teachers and students conclude “Jafar's chapter on knowledge. Knowledge, for “Jafar,” is the result of introspection, a response within the individual to the divine. But it is also the result of a process of teaching and studying, and it must - find expression in relevant human activity. The whole would seem to be a mixture of moderate Shîah views of revealed and inspired knowledge and the “orthodox” concern with the methodology of the transmission of traditions and their practi- cal legal signi- cance.

Like medieval lovers, they ended up dead, side by side, their corpses rotting, undiscovered. I understood it as a suicide, a shared action, shared despair—“ego despair,” I said at first and several times throughout the day. I elaborated: not despair at the state of the world they had struggled so long and so hard to remake; if that had been the motive, they would have killed themselves in public, their deaths a statement, immolations. This suicide was private, secret, hidden—ashamed—it left not even a note. This image I made of their deaths, their bodies, was wrong, but I didn’t know it yet. The first news was too slight, too incomplete.

what we need for the moment is not so much a body of belief as a body of people familiarized with certain ideas. If we could even effect in one per cent of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning.43 Lewis makes it clear that a desire for this recovery motivated his writing of the Ransom Trilogy—a recovery of an “old mode” of looking at the cosmos. He wrote to one reader that “the substitution of heaven for space…is my favourite idea in the book.”44 Lewis saw that the modern scientific cosmos had led to a loss of essential imaginative and emotional experiences that were the strongest features of the Medieval Model. No, we don’t need to accept the old science. Lewis isn’t arguing that we reject everything we have learned about what space actually is like. Rather, he wants us to recover the image of the cosmos as living, breathing, Word-spoken. In our reduction of the cosmos to the material, we no longer experience wonder, awe, praise, or the bottom-heavy security of those who look up into a vast well of starlight. And it is this sense that he seeks to reawaken.

Over the last decade, entire neighbourhoods have lost their identity to the ever-growing clothing retail market. Since my first visit to the Marais quarter of Paris in 2003, I have seen the area shift from a charming, off-beat district featuring a mix of up-and-coming designers, traditional ateliers, bookstores and boulangeries to what amounts to an open-air shopping mall dominated by international brands. In the last five years, an antique shop has been replaced by a chic clothing store and the last neighbourhood supermarket transformed into a threestorey flagship of one of the clothing giants. The old quarter is now only faintly visible, like writing on a medieval palimpsest: overhanging the gleaming sign of a sleek clothes shop, on a faded ceramic fascia board, is written ‘BOULANGERIE’. In economically developed countries, people’s motivations for spending money have long since shifted from needs to desires. There’s no denying we need places to live in, food to nourish us and clothes to dress ourselves in, and, while we’re at it, we might as well do these things with a certain degree of refinement to help make life as pleasurable as possible. But when did the clothing industry turn into little more than a cash machine whose main purpose seems to be its own never-ending growth? Just as clothing retail shops are sucking the identity out of entire neighbourhoods, so that the architecture becomes little more than a backdrop for their products, the production of the garments they sell is eating away at the Earth’s resources and the life of the workers who are producing them. Fashion has become the second most polluting industry in the world. And with what result? Our wardrobes are cluttered with so many clothes that the mere sight of them becomes overwhelming, yet at the same time we feel a constant craving for the next purchase that will transform our look.

motivated the upset citizens of Moscow to march against the

The essence of the Industrial Revolution consists in the triumph of this principle over the medieval and mercantilist regulations. Modern economy first begins with the introduction of the principle of laissez-faire, and the idea of individual freedom first succeeds in establishing itself as the ideology of this economic liberalism. These connections do not, of course, prevent both the idea of labour and the idea of freedom from developing into independent ethical forces and from often being interpreted in a really idealistic sense. But to realize how small a part was played by idealism in the rise of economic liberalism, it is only necessary to recall that the demand for freedom of trade was directed, above all, against the skilled master, in order to take away from him the only advantage he had over 55 the mere contractor. Adam Smith himself was still far from claiming such idealistic motives for the justification of free competition; on the contrary, he saw in human selfishness and the pursuit of personal interests the best guarantee for the smooth functioning of the economic organism and the realization of the general weal. The whole optimism of the enlightenment was bound up with this belief in the selfregulating power of economic life and the automatic adjustment of conflicting interests; as soon as this began to disappear, it became more and more difficult to identify economic freedom with the interests of the general weal and to regard free competition as a universal blessing.

Literary tradition is certainly stronger than originality. And the thousands of authors of our day who write novels and short stories, would in medieval times have written allegories.

The medieval European, who shared the fundamental assumptions of his Muslim contemporary, would have agreed with him in ascribing religious movements to religious causes, and would have sought no further for an explanation. But when Europeans ceased to accord first place to religion in their thoughts, sentiments, interests, and loyalties, they also ceased to admit that other men, in other times and places, could have done so. To a rationalistic and materialistic generation, it was inconceivable that such great debates and mighty conflicts could have involved no more than ‘merely’ religious issues. And so historians, once they had passed the stage of amused contempt, devised a series of explanations, setting forth for what they described as the ‘real’ or 'ultimate’ significance 'underlying’ religious movements and differences. The clashes and squabbles of the early churches, the great Schism, the Reformation, all were reinterpreted in terms of motives and interests reasonable by the standards of the day—and for religious movements of Islam too explanations were found that tallied with the outlook and interests of the finders.

History is not a mere record of events, but tries to understand the life of the past. The pilgrim seeking the way to the past must first of all, like Christian at the wicket gate, free himself from the burden of all his present prejudices and even principles. He must forget for the time being whether he is a socialist or capitalist, an imperialist or a democrat, Protestant or Roman Catholic, German-American or Scotch-Irish. To see the scenes of the past he must borrow the eyes of the past. What men did then will mean little to him unless he comprehends their motives, their ideas, and their emotions, and the circumstances under which they acted. One of the greatest benefits derivable from the study of history is this entering into the life and thought of other people in other times and places. Thereby we broaden our own outlook upon the world as truly as if we had traveled to foreign countries or learned to think and to express ourselves in another language than our own. History, indeed, alone makes it possible for us to travel both in time and space.