Chaucer Quotes

The gretteste clerkes been noght wisest men. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Til that the brighte sonne loste his hewe; For th'orisonte hath reft the sonne his lyght; This is as muche to seye as it was nyght! ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Though Plente that is goddesse of rychesses hielde adoun with ful horn, and withdraweth nat hir hand, as many richesses as the see torneth upward sandes whan it is moeved with ravysshynge blastes, or elles as manye rychesses as ther schynen bryghte sterres in hevene on the sterry nyghtes; yit, for al that, mankende nolde nat cese to wepe wrecchide pleyntes. And al be it so that God resceyveth gladly hir preiers, and yyveth hem, as fool-large, moche gold, and apparayleth coveytous folk with noble or cleer honours; yit semeth hem haven igeten nothyng, but alwey hir cruel ravyne, devourynge al that they han geten, scheweth othere gapynges (that is to seyn, gapyn and desiren yit after mo rychesses.) What brydles myghte withholden to any certeyn ende the disordene covetise of men, whan evere the rather that it fletith in large yiftes, the more ay brenneth in hem the thurst of havynge? Certes he that qwakynge and dredful weneth hymselven nedy, he ne lyveth nevermo ryche. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

For tyme ylost may nought recovered be. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

He was as fresh as is the month of May. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

And then the wren gan scippen and to daunce. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem. ~ Harold Bloom

Trouthe is the hyest thyng that man may kepe. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

If gold rust, what then will iron do?/ For if a priest be foul in whom we trust/ No wonder that a common man should rust ... ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted. ~ Anna Brackett

people have managed to marry without arithmetic ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

You should really be the one to take off her tunic," Antero advised. "That all-men-are-evil thing ... if she wakes up and finds me stripping her bare, she might instinctively boil my blood or fireball me off the mountain."
Jett nodded.
"I'm impressed you can still think logically and ogle my lusty body at the same time. ~ Jack Chaucer

You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer's wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in '75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and plowing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, Limp as bindweed, if it break at all Life's iron crust Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder. ~ R.S. Thomas

Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge
With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Youth may outrun the old, but not outwit. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity. ~ Wendy Lesser

Abstinence is approved of God. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

He kept his tippet stuffed with pins for curls, And pocket-knives, to give to pretty girls. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in switch licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So Priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn't marry her for the world if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she could possibly marry. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

As a text, the Quran is more than the foundation of the Islamic religion; it is the source of Arabic grammar. It is to Arabic what Homer is to Greek, what Chaucer is to English: a snapshot of an evolving language, frozen forever in time ~ Reza Aslan

In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare. ~ Susan Hill

Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise. ~ James Russell Lowell

If love be good, from whence cometh my woe? ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Habit maketh no monk, ne wearing of gilt spurs maketh no knight. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Full wise is he that can himselven knowe. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

I used to be in school, like a good boy. Medieval Literature. Von Eschenbach, Chaucer, Milton... Yes, sir, no, sir. Then I had that... Crisis. You know it? Wake up one morning and everything's all wrong? Wake up one morning and it occurs to you the milk's spoiled and the bread is getting moldy. Wake up and it just hits you. Someday you're gonna die. Maybe like that girl last night died. Face down in an alley with a caved in head. Such a terrible thing and what for? Why life? Why This life? Why This soap? Why these hands? What's it all mean? Deep down you fear nothing. But you still hope something. Either way, you're not really sure. That's my crisis. I don't wanna die. But if I'm gonna die, first I'm gonna live. I'm gonna peel life like fruit, and use it up. I'm gonna light up an' burn. I'll burn and burn until I'm snuffed out. Then I'll just fade away. But until then I'm gonna live! I'm ready. I'm gonna do it. Come what may, one hundred percent. ~ Paul Pope

Of harmes two the lesse is for to cheese. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

The bisy larke, messager of day. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Min be the travaille, and thin be the glorie. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Hyt is not al golde that glareth. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

And as for me, thogh that I can but lyte, On bakes for to rede I me delyte, And to hem yeve I feyth and ful credence, And in myn herte have hem in reverence So hertely, that ther is game noon, That fro my bokes maketh me to goon, But hit be seldom, on the holyday; Save, certeynly, when that the month of May Is comen, and that I here the foules singe, And that the floures ginnen for to springe, Farwel my book and my devocion. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

The man who has no wife is no cuckold. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Patience is a conquering virtue. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

The handsome gifts that fate and nature lend us Most often are the very ones that end us. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

The life so short, the crafts so long to learn. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

We're like two dogs in battle on their own;
They fought all day but neither got the bone,
There came a kite above them, nothing loth,
And while they fought he took it from them both."
From Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

The ancient triumph of Christianity proved to be the single greatest cultural transformation our world has ever seen.

Without it the entire history of Late Antiquity would not have happened as it did.

We would never have had the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, or modernity as we know it.

There could never have been a Matthew Arnold. Or any of the Victorian poets. Or any of the other authors of our canon: no Milton, no Shakespeare, no Chaucer.

We would have had none of our revered artists: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, or Rembrandt. And none of our brilliant composers: Mozart, Handel, or Bach.

To be sure, we would have had other Miltons, Michelangelos, and Mozarts in their places, and it is impossible to know whether these would have been better or worse.

But they would have been incalculably different. ~ Bart D. Ehrman

By Pluto sent at the request of Saturn. Arcita's horse in terror danced a pattern And leapt aside and foundered as he leapt, And ere he was aware Arcite was swept Out of the saddle and pitched upon his head Onto the ground, and there he lay for dead; His breast was shattered by the saddle-bow. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Nikki could barely pull herself away from the spinning alien beauty in the window, but Elon Musk was on the big screen with a drink in his hand.
"Congratulations, Starship, on entering Martian orbit," he said, smiling and raising his flute of champagne from the now very distant Florida peninsula. "Cheers to the six of you and best wishes for a safe and stellar landing on Monday."
-- from the upcoming novel MARS COLONY AGATHA: NIKKI RED by Jack Chaucer, 1-1-20 ~ Jack Chaucer

Why incentivize laziness? High-school students shouldn't be discouraged from grappling, sometimes unsuccessfully, with challenging books, pictures, and songs. A really, really good work of art doesn't bow down to you; you step up to it, and it rewards you. In the end, kids faced with what Chaucer actually wrote may still dislike him, and I'm fine with that; they will have earned that opinion rather than had it handed to them. For heaven's sake, it's easy for kids to see themselves and their peers in a rap song. When they can start to see themselves in a 14th-century poem, then they're actually learning something. ~ Jeff Sypeck

Be nat wrooth, my lord, though that I pleye. Ful ofte in game a sooth I have herd seye! ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

The smylere with the knyf under the cloke. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

There's never a new fashion but it's old. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more. ~ Henry David Thoreau

How do you tell your mom you're following your dream when it's the one that warned you to befriend a psychotic boy before he shoots up your school?
-- from the upcoming "Streaks of Blue ~ Jack Chaucer

He who accepts his poverty unhurt I'd say is rich although he lacked a shirt. But truly poor are they who whine and fret and covet what they cannot hope to get. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Three years went by in happiness and health; He bore himself so well in peace and war That there was no one Theseus valued more. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

I know that my singing doesn't make the moon rise, nor does it make the stars shine. But without my song, the night would seem empty and incomplete. There is more to daybreak than light, just as there is more to nighttime than darkness. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Woe to the cook whose sauce has no sting. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

And after winter folweth grene May. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

The quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple choking words sobbed out. ~ James Russell Lowell

He is gentle that doeth gentle deeds. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

By God," quod he, "for pleynly, at a word,
Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord! ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo? ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

I may look like a goddess to you, but know that I will always feel less than human for as long as I breathe. That's not your fault, Antero. That's the fault of those who I've already served justice to and those who will feel it soon. ~ Jack Chaucer

Eke wonder last but nine deies never in toun. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Suffice it to say I was compelled to create this group in order to find everyone who is, let's say, borrowing liberally from my INESTIMABLE FOLIO OF CANONICAL MASTERPIECES (sorry, I just do that sometimes), and get you all together. It's the least I could do.

I mean, seriously. Those soliloquies in Moby-Dick? Sooo Hamlet and/or Othello, with maybe a little Shylock thrown in. Everyone from Pip in Great Expectations to freakin' Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre mentions my plays, sometimes completely mangling my words in nineteenth-century middle-American dialect for humorous effect (thank you, Sir Clemens). Many people (cough Virginia Woolf cough) just quote me over and over again without attribution. I hear James Joyce even devoted a chapter of his giant novel to something called the "Hamlet theory," though do you have some sort of newfangled English? It looks like gobbledygook to me. The only people who don't seek me out are like Chaucer and Dante and those ancient Greeks. For whatever reason.

And then there are the titles. The Sound and the Fury? Mine. Infinite Jest? Mine. Proust, Nabokov, Steinbeck, and Agatha Christie all have titles that are me-inspired. Brave New World? Not just the title, but half the plot has to do with my work. Even Edgar Allan Poe named a character after my Tempest's Prospero (though, not surprisingly, things didn't turn out well for him!). I'm like the star to every wandering bark, the arrow of every compass, the buzzard to every haw ~ Sarah Schmelling

Pearl introduces an original story, in a form which was to become one of the most frequent in mediaeval literature, the dream-vision. Authors like Chaucer and Langland use this form, in which the narrator describes another world - usually a heavenly paradise - which is compared with the earthly human world. In Pearl, the narrator sees his daughter who died in infancy, 'the ground of all my bliss'. She now has a kind of perfect knowledge, which her father can never comprehend. The whole poem underlines the divide between human comprehension and perfection; these lines show the gap between possible perfection and fallen humanity which, thematically, anticipate many literary examinations of man's fall, the most well known being Milton's late Renaissance epic, Paradise Lost. ~ Ronald Carter

A love grown old is not the love once new. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

If gold ruste, what shall iren do? ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

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

Mordre wol out, that se we day by day. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

He hath considered shortly, in a clause1763, The trespas 1764 of hem bothe, and eek the cause, 1765 And althogh that his ire hir gilt accused, Yet in his resoun he hem bothe excused, As thus: he thoghte wel that every man Wol helpe himself in love if that he kan, And eek delivere himself out of prisoun; ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word "depression." Depression, most people know, used to be termed "melancholia," a word which appears in English as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. "Melancholia" would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a blank tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness.

It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated -- the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer -- had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control. ~ William Styron

doctors & druggists wash each other's hands ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

... for you will never, I trust, disconnect what you may yourselves be learning from the hope and prospect of being enabled thereby to teach others more effectually. If you do, and your studies in this way become a selfish thing, if you are content to leave them barren of all profit to others, of this you may be sure, that in the end they will prove not less barren of profit to yourselves. In one noble line Chaucer has characterized the true scholar:- "And gladly would he learn and gladly teach." Resolve that in the spirit of this line you will work and live. ~ Richard Chenevix Trench

And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Until we're rotten, we cannot be ripe. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

The proverbe saith that many a smale maketh a grate. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

That field hath eyen, and the wood hath ears. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

But of no nombre mencioun made he, Of bigamye, or of octogamye33. Why sholde men thanne speke of it vileinye34? ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

He that loveth God will do diligence to please God by his works, and abandon himself, with all his might, well for to do. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

And for to see, and eek for to be seie. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

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

And as for me, though that I konne but lyte,
On bokes for to rede I me delyte,
And to hem yive I feyth and ful credence,
And in myn herte have hem in reverence
So hertely, that ther is game noon
That fro my bokes maketh me to goon,
But yt be seldom on the holyday,
Save, certeynly, whan that the month of May
Is comen, and that I here the foules synge,
And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge,
Farewel my bok and my devocioun! ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

It may be summer down at the lower elevations, but the goddess Ione usually defended the summit with wild or wintry weather. Hurricane-force winds, thunderstorms, ice storms, snow storms, dense fog and even hail the size of human heads -- any or all of these could be awaiting the intrepid monarch. ~ Jack Chaucer

There's no workman, whatsoever he be, That may both work well and hastily. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Yow loveres axe I now this questioun, Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamoun? 490 That oon may seen his lady day by day, But in prison he moot dwelle alway. That other wher him list may ryde or go, But seen his lady shal he never-mo. Now demeth as yow liste, ye that can, 495 For I wol telle forth as I bigan. Explicit prima Pars. Sequitur pars secunda. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Nowhere in Chaucer do we find what can be called a radically allegorical poem. ~ C.S. Lewis

... murder wol out ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

When I see imposters like ... Swinburne, [and] Fleay, who know as much early English as my dog, & who fancy they can settle Chaucer difficulties as they blow their noses, then I ridicule or kick them. But earnest students I treat with respect, & am only too glad to learn from them. ~ James Turner

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

people can die of mere imagination ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

But, Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tickleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age, alias! that al wole envenyme, Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. Lat go, farewel! the devel go therwith! The flour is goon, ther is namoore to telle; The bren, as I best kan, now most I selle. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

One shouldn't be too inquisitive in life Either about God's secrets or one's wife. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Whoso will pray, he must fast and be clean, And fat his soul, and make his body lean. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

A bettre preest, I trowe that nowher noon is. He wayted after no pompe and reverence, 525 Ne maked him a spyced conscience, But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve, He taughte, and first he folwed it him-selve. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

3440 An hole he fond3440, ful lowe upon a bord, Theras3441 the cat was wont in for to crepe, And at that hole he looked in ful depe3442, And atte laste he hadde of him a sighte. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision, this artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work and poetry; of the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante, of Keats and William Morris as of Chaucer and Theocritus. It lies at the base of all noble, realistic and romantic work as opposed to the colourless and empty abstractions of our own eighteenth-century poets and of the classical dramatists of France, or of the vague spiritualities of the German sentimental school: opposed, too, to that spirit of transcendentalism which also was root and flower itself of the great Revolution, underlying the impassioned contemplation of Wordsworth and giving wings and fire to the eagle- like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of philosophy, though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day, bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to Oxford, the school of Emerson to America. Yet is this spirit of transcendentalism alien to the spirit of art. For the artist can accept no sphere of life in exchange for life itself. For him there is no escape from the bondage of the earth: there is not even the desire of escape. He is indeed the only true realist: symbolism, which is the essence of the transcendental spirit, is alien to him. The metaphysical mind of Asia will create for itself the monstrous, many-breasted idol of Ephesus, but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual life which conforms ~ Oscar Wilde

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was expected to clock in at anywhere between 100 and 120 chapters. Unfortunately, the dude only managed to finish 24 tales before he suffered an insurmountable and permanent state of writer's block commonly known as death. ~ Jacopo Della Quercia

Life is short. Art long. Opportunity is fleeting. Expierience treacherous. Judgement difficult. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

'My lige lady, generally,' quod he, 'Wommen desyren to have sovereyntee As well over hir housbond as hir love.' ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

You are the cause by which I die. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively. ~ Harold Bloom

What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday. ~ John Mark Reynolds

What is better than wisdom? Woman. And what is better than a good woman? Nothing. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe. ~ James Joyce