Quotes & Sayings About Chivalry And Knighthood

Sir Knight of the Sorrowful Face, I cannot bear with patience some of the things your Grace says. They are enough to make me suspect that all you have told me about knighthood and winning kingdoms and empires, of bestowing islands and giving me other favors and honors according to the customs of chivalry must all be hot air and lies, and all a cock and bull story or cock and ball story or whatsoever you term it. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

When his apprenticeship was finished (the candidate for Knighthood) was received into the Knightly Order by a ritual of sacramental awe ... — Ariel Durant

[G]enerosity ... is the mistress and queen that gives lustre to every virtue, as it is not hard to prove. Where could one find a man, however powerful and rich, who isn't blamed if he is mean? And who, though not appreciated for his many other qualities, doesn't earn praise by his generosity? Liberality on its own makes a worthy man; and that can't be achieved by high birth, courtliness, wisdom, nobility, wealth, strength, chivalry, boldness, authority, beauty, or anything else. But just as the rose is more lovely than any other flower when it opens fresh and new, so where liberality appears it surpasses all other virtues and increases five hundred times the qualities it finds in a worthy, upright man. — Chretien De Troyes

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life ... — Barbara Tuchman

Sadly as some old mediaeval knight
Gazed at the arms he could no longer wield,
The sword two-handed and the shining shield
Suspended in the hall, and full in sight,
While secret longings for the lost delight
Of tourney or adventure in the field
Came over him, and tears but half concealed
Trembled and fell upon his beard of white,
So I behold these books upon their shelf,
My ornaments and arms of other days;
Not wholly useless, though no longer used,
For they remind me of my other self,
Younger and stronger, and the pleasant ways
In which I walked, now clouded and confused. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

What if custom is wrong? demanded the part of her that believed in the code of chivalry. A knight must set things right. — Tamora Pierce

Vain-glorious man, when fluttering wind does blow
In his light wing's, is lifted up to sky;
The scorn of-knighthood and true chivalry.
To think, without desert of gentle deed
And noble worth, to be advanced high,
Such praise is shame, but honour, virtue's meed,
Doth bear the fairest flower in honourable seed. — Edmund Spenser