Tao Te Ching
Geoffrey Chaucer
1343 – 1400 CE
“Father of English literature”
Scientist, philosopher, diplomat, “Father of English literature,” and greatest Middle Ages English poet; Chaucer transitioned literature in French and Latin to an English for the English-speaking. Also a page, bureaucrat, soldier, messenger, administrator, and valet; he portrayed and spoke for the common person. This support for the populace however created a backlash from the monarchy and he was fined and imprisoned. Claimed by the Protestant movement as an early forefather, he tried to separate religion from superstition, was rumored to have beaten up a Franciscan Friar on a public street, and supported religious reform.
Eras
Western
Renaissance (1304 – 1576 CE)Sources
Unlisted Sources
Troilus and Cressida
Quotes by Geoffrey Chaucer (20 quotes)
“Friends, each one the other must obey [for] love will not be constrained by mastery; both men and women by nature love their liberty and not to be constrained and so both become servant and lord.”
from Canterbury Tales
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“This friar boasts that he knows hell, and God knows that it is little wonder; Friars and fiends are seldom far apart.”
from Canterbury Tales
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“But O ye lovers, bathed in bliss always, recall the griefs gone by of other days… forgetting not that ye have felt yourselves Love’s power to displease, lest ye might win Love’s prize with too great ease.”
from Troilus and Cressida
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“And since you may not justly love deny, then take it as a virtue of the mind… For love at last must all constrain and bind… therefore pray take heed to follow love that best can guide and lead.”
from Troilus and Cressida
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“For love lends luster to an honorable name,
And saves mankind from wickedness and shame.”
from Troilus and Cressida
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“One shouldn't be too inquisitive in life—either about God's secrets or one' wife.”
from Canterbury Tales
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“That both of these are vices is well seen—
To trust all men or all men disbelieve;
But no vice enters in the golden mean.”
from Troilus and Cressida
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“For both of us with right on love complain.
I am so full of sorrow, I maintain
Another single drop could find no place
To sit on me, because there is no space.”
from Troilus and Cressida
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“It may quite well be that without cause you are thus in despair.
How can you tell beforehand how you'll fare?
And why must you the worst always suppose,
Although the outcome you nor no one knows?
”
from Troilus and Cressida
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“Then give me neither thank nor give me blame
The fault, if anywhere my tale be lame,
... for who would dare assert
A blind man should in colors be expert?”
from Troilus and Cressida
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“But I can say for certain, it's no lie,
God made us all to wax and multiply.
Take King Solomon of long ago;
We hear he had a thousand wives or so.
And would to God it were allowed to me
Te be refreshed, aye, half so much as he!”
from Canterbury Tales
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“For talk of medicine and surgery;
For he was was grounded in astronomy...
Ready he was with his apothecaries,
To send him drugs and all electuaries...
And yet he was right chary of expense;
He kept the gold he gained from pestilence.”
from Canterbury Tales
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“He says that to be wedded is no sin;
Better to marry than to burn within.”
from Canterbury Tales
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“Christ was a maid, and yet shaped like a man,
And many a saint, since this world began.”
from Canterbury Tales
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“And therefore, at the king's court, my brother,
Each man for himself, there is no other.”
from Canterbury Tales
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“Come where thou need not to learn from me,
For thou shalt, by thine own experience,
Be able in a professorial chair to lecture on this subject
Better than Virgil, while he was alive”
from Canterbury Tales
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“She'd been respectable throughout her life,
With five churched husbands bringing joy and strife,
Not counting other company in youth;
But thereof there's no need to speak, in truth.”
from Canterbury Tales
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“Yet am I but a horse, and horse's law
I must obey, and with my fellows draw.”
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“He beats me and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction! would it be otherwise—that I could beat him while he railed at me.”
from Troilus and Cressida
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“all goes to show that marriage is a misery and a woe”
from Canterbury Tales
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Quotes about Geoffrey Chaucer (6 quotes)
“Zealots there are in crowds; but the masters of moderation are few and far between. Of these few the first and greatest is Chaucer... Unfortunately, he lived at a time when modern English was still in formation.. a thousand treasures of humane, unzealous wisdom have remained for 400 years almost undiscoverably buried int eh depths of Chaucer's Middle English.”
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“Chaucer was one of the most original men who ever lived. There had never been anything like the lively realism of the ride to Canterbury done or dreamed of in our literature before. He is not only the father of all our poets, but the grandfather of all our hundred million novelists.”
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“Chaucer's characters live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass on, each sustaining onr of these characters; nor can a child be born who is not one of these characters of Chaucer.”
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“I read Chaucer still with as much pleasure as almost any of our poets. He is a master of manners, of description, and the first tale-teller in the true enlivened natural way.”
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“Chaucer's lively wit and unforgettable poetry gave to twice-told tales a new life... Chaucer's rich contribution to the human comedy... bears witness to the unconventional, and perhaps disreputable, character of his work... he wrote the first great poem in the English language in the interstices of a busy public life.”
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“Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible;—he owes his celebrity, merely to his antiquity, which he does not deserve”
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