Top 100 Chaucer's Quotes
#1. If we took Chaucer's writings at face value, we'd have to conclude he was a complete drip.
John Hutton
#2. 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
#3. Chaucer, like Homer, writes about a journey, but as a Christian he has a different goal. Homer wanted to go home, but Chaucer's pilgrims want a place of man's true home: paradise
John Mark Reynolds
#4. The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.
George Saintsbury
#5. The only really detestable character in Chaucer's company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch's hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare's, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#6. Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to maintain. In fact, there was never such a year. The language of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time was no better and no worse than that of our own - just different.
Jean Aitchison
#7. 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
#8. My house is small, but you are learned men And by your arguments can make a place Twenty foot broad as infinite as space.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#10. One cannot scold or complain at every word. Learn to endure patiently, or else, as I live and breathe, you shall learn it whether you want or not.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#11. Take a cat, nourish it well with milk and tender meat, make it a couch of silk ...
Geoffrey Chaucer
#12. What is better than wisdom? Woman. And what is better than a good woman? Nothing.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#13. It is ful fair a man to bere him evene,/For alday meeteth men at unset stevene.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#16. Yblessed be god that I have wedded fyve! Welcome the sixte, whan that evere he shal.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#18. And so it is in politics, dear brother, Each for himself alone, there is no other.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#22. And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo?
Geoffrey Chaucer
#24. Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.
Ezra Pound
#27. Life is short. Art long. Opportunity is fleeting. Expierience treacherous. Judgement difficult.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#29. One shouldn't be too inquisitive in life Either about God's secrets or one's wife.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#30. There's no workman, whatsoever he be, That may both work well and hastily.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#34. 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
#35. But Christ's lore and his apostles twelve,
He taught and first he followed it himself.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#37. 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
#38. Nowhere in Chaucer do we find what can be called a radically allegorical poem.
C.S. Lewis
#39. O woman's counsel is so often cold! A woman's counsel brought us first to woe, Made Adam out of Paradise to go Where he had been so merry, so well at ease.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#40. 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
#41. What's said is said and goes upon its way Like it or not, repent it as you may.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#42. 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
#45. Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.
Joanne Harris
#46. We have to reach out to kids sooner. Everybody needs to step outside of their comfort zone and become friends with someone who is different, no matter what that difference is. And we all have to do it much sooner then senior year of high school.
Jack Chaucer
#50. 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
#51. Certes, they been lye to hounds, for an hound when he cometh by the roses, or by other bushes, though he may nat pisse, yet wole he heve up his leg and make a countenance to pisse.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#52. I will eviscerate you in fiction. Every pimple, every character flaw. I was naked for a day; you will be naked for eternity.
A Knight's Tale
Geoffrey Chaucer
#55. But manly set the world on sixe and sevene; And, if thou deye a martir, go to hevene.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#56. people can die of mere imagination - Geffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
Paul Strohm
#57. Ther nis no werkman, whatsoevere he be, That may bothe werke wel and hastily.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#58. The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.
James Lee Burke
#59. For sondry scoles maken sotile clerkis;
Womman of manye scoles half a clerk is.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#60. 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
#62. Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#64. You know what my favourite quotation is? ... It's from Chaucer ... Criseyde says it, I am myne owene woman, wel at ese.
Mary McCarthy
#66. 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
#68. Thou shalt make castels thanne in Spayne And dreme of joye, all but in vayne.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#69. 'My lige lady, generally,' quod he, 'Wommen desyren to have sovereyntee As well over hir housbond as hir love.'
Geoffrey Chaucer
#70. This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#72. Drunkenness is the very sepulcher
Of man's wit and his discretion.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#73. 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
#74. I will, however, establish that success in love, as in all other aspects of life, belongs, as a rule, to the persistent and fiber man. Chaucer had reason to make the Old Bath confess: 'The truth is, more or less, we always succumb to attention and perseverance'.
Frank Harris
#75. 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
#77. 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
#78. Ek gret effect men write in place lite; Th'entente is al, and nat the lettres space.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#82. I would find a way to save souls while eradicating demons from this world. I'd find a way to save my own soul. I just had to.
Emily Chaucer.
Demon executioner.
Human savior.
I could only hope.
Ketley Allison
#83. The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
William Hazlitt
#84. For in their hearts doth Nature stir them so Then people long on pilgrimage to go And palmers to be seeking foreign strands To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#85. Go litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye,
Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye,
So sende myght to make in som comedye!
But litel book, no makyng thow n'envie,
But subgit be to alle poesye;
And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace
Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#87. What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?
Pete Hamill
#88. The worshipful father and first founder and embellisher of ornate eloquence in our English, I mean Master Geoffrey Chaucer.
William Caxton
#92. Soun is noght but air ybroken, And every speche that is spoken, Loud or privee, foul or fair, In his substaunce is but air; For as flaumbe is but lighted smoke, Right so soun is air ybroke.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#94. That of all the floures in the mede, Thanne love I most these floures white and rede, Suche as men callen daysyes in her toune.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#95. No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
Harold Bloom
#96. Habit maketh no monk, ne wearing of gilt spurs maketh no knight.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#99. Ne nevere mo ne lakked hire pite;
Tendre-herted, slydynge of corage;
But trewely, I kan nat telle hire age.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#100. In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.
Frederick Lenz
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