Commonplace Book History Quotes

More Quotes from my Commonplace Book

I am gathering all of my history quotes from my commonplace book and decided to share some of my favorites. I may add to them as time passes. Because that’s what time does when you look at history, right?

I’ll divide the quotes into the four major time periods when they were written that we use in our history studies.

Ancient Quotes

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4 quadrants: Michelangelo's David, Paint brushes in a jar, the fingers touching from the Sistene Chapel, and blank pale olive color. With Michelangelo quote about creating

Medieval history quotes

I don’t have any good quotes about history from this era! I’ll have to keep looking. It seems like the juiciest quotes are from the Early American period. I’m probably just showing my centricities.

Most of the quotes I’ve ever had even remotely related to medieval times simply use the word medieval to mean hopelessly out of date, like Vince Lombardi’s quote:

“A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.”
~ Vince Lombardi

I do enjoy modern commentary assessing what would be fit in appropriately in medieval times even though it is from the modern era, like Frank Sinatra JR’s comment about his dad:

“There was a time in medieval England when they had wandering minstrels … A wandering minstrel would have been Frank Sinatra’s counterpart had he lived during the time of Henry II in 1190 or 1180.”
~ Frank Sinatra, Jr.

I like that quote because you have to know both Frank Sinatra’s music AND Henry the II.

What about quotes from Shakespeare’s history plays? Would that count? I think it might!