This view of the case amused Esther for a time, but not for long — the matter was too serious for any treatment but a joke, and joking made it more s… - Henry Brooks Adams

Everyone knows they’re going to die,” he said again, “but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.

A Church which embraced, with equal sympathy, and within a hundred years, the Virgin, Saint Bernard, William of Champeaux and the School of Saint Victor, Peter the Venerable, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Dominic, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Bonaventure, was more liberal than any modern state can afford to be. Radical contradictions the State may perhaps tolerate, but never embrace or profess. Such elasticity long ago vanished from human thought.

The jugleor became a jongleur and degenerated into the street-juggler; the minstrel, or menestrier, became very early a word of abuse, equivalent to blackguard; and from the beginning the profession seems to have been socially decried, like that of a music-hall singer or dancer in later times; but in the eleventh century, or perhaps earlier still, the jongleur seems to have been a poet, and to have composed the songs he sang.