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What is better than wisdom? Woman. And what is better than a good woman? Nothing.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
Love is blind.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
Full wise is he that can himself know.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
The guilty think all talk is of themselves.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
The latter end of joy is woe.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
He is gentle that doeth gentle deeds.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
Truth is the highest thing that man may keep.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
Nature, the vicar of the Almighty Lord.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, "Parliament of Fowls"
- A yokel mind loves stories from of old,
- Being the kind it can repeat and hold.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
- A whetstone is no carving instrument,
- And yet it maketh sharp the carving tool;
- And if you see my efforts wrongly spent,
- Eschew that course and learn out of my school;
- For thus the wise may profit by the fool,
- And edge his wit, and grow more keen and wary,
- For wisdom shines opposed to its contrary.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, Troilus and Cressida
- And so it is in politics, dear brother,
- Each for himself alone, there is no other.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
- Gold stimulates the heart, or so we're told.
- He therefore had a special love of gold.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
The man who has no wife is no cuckold.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
- Remember in the forms of speech comes change
- Within a thousand years, and words that then
- Were well esteemed, seem foolish now and strange;
- And yet they spake them so, time and again,
- And thrived in love as well as any men;
- And so to win their loves in sundry days,
- In sundry lands there are as many ways.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, Troilus and Cressida
- By God, if women had written stories,
- As clerks had within here oratories,
- They would have written of men more wickedness
- Than all the mark of Adam may redress.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
No empty handed man can lure a bird.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
- For there's one thing, my lords, it's safe to say;
- Lovers must each be ready to obey
- The other, if they would long keep company.
- Love will not be constrained by mastery;
- When mastery comes the god of love anon
- Stretches his wings and farewell! he is gone.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
- Certain, when I was born, so long ago,
- Death drew the tap of life and let it flow;
- And ever since the tap has done its task,
- And now there's little but an empty cask.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
Forbid us something, and that thing we desire; but press it on us hard, and we will flee.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
- Alas, alas, that ever love was sin!
- I ever followed natural inclination
- Under the power of my constellation
- And was unable to deny, in truth,
- My chamber of Venus to a likely youth.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
- For out of old fields, as men saith,
- Cometh all this new corn from year to year;
- And out of old books, in good faith,
- Cometh all this new science that men learn.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, "Parliament of Foules"
- Yet do not miss the moral, my good men.
- For Saint Paul says that all that’s written well
- Is written down some useful truth to tell.
- Then take the wheat and let the chaff lie still.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
- In April the sweet showers fall
- And pierce the drought of March to the root, and all
- The veins are bathed in liquor of such power
- As brings about the engendering of the flower.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
- Time lost, as men may see,
- For nothing may recovered be.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, Troilus and Cressida
Death is the end of every worldly pain.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, "Parliament of Fowls"
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