Gerbert recognized quality in the plainness of the woman’s robe, and in the carving of a lintel, and in the hanging of a rug on a whitewashed wall. T… - Judith Tarr

I would tell you that the West is sadly fallen. What men knew once, they know no longer, nor want to know. It is all iron and edged blades, and lord smiting lord for a fistful of power. They dream of empires, and they kill for a furlong of wasteland.
"But I, my lord, I want to know what the world is."

There was no help for it. He was what he was, and that was an incorrigible meddler. Which, he reflected, was not an inadequate description of a mage.

Now there was sophistry. A mage was a perilous beast, but a mage who was also a logician and a theologian was deadly enough to outface the devil himself.