Chaucer Canterbury Quotes & Sayings

But al be that he was a philosophre, Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre. — Geoffrey Chaucer

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

Patience is a conquering virtue. — Geoffrey Chaucer

For if a priest be foul, on whom we trust,
No wonder is a common man should rust
-The Prologue of Chaucers Canterbury Tales- — Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer's world in The Canterbury Tales brings together, for the first time, a diversity of characters, social levels, attitudes, and ways of life. The tales themselves make use of a similarly wide range of forms and styles, which show the diversity of cultural influences which the author had at his disposal. Literature, with Chaucer, has taken on a new role: as well as affirming a developing language, it is a mirror of its times - but a mirror which teases as it reveals, which questions while it narrates, and which opens up a range of issues and questions, instead of providing simple, easy answers. — Ronald Carter

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

If gold rusts, what then can iron do? — Geoffrey Chaucer

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

people can die of mere imagination - Geffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales — Paul Strohm

have you killed me, false thief? — Chaucer Geoffrey

This backwards journey in the narrating of this 'membering, this remembrance, is a lesson I learned from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and which considers how language, in this case, English, the only language I know, is at present of profound interest, when used in a non-traditional manner. I have used this language in The Polished Hoe, and I call it many things, but the most precise definition I have given it is contained in a booklet published by the Giller Prize Foundation, celebrating the tenth anniversary of this literary prize. In that review of the literary problems I faced in the writing of The Polished Hoe in 2002, my main concern was to find a language, or to more strictly use the language I already knew, in such a way that it became, in my manipulation of it, a "new" language. And to explain the result of this experiment, I said that I intended to "creolize Oxford English. — Austin Clarke

It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years,
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his Characters of Men.
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past,
These are indeed exceptions; but they show
How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow
Into the arctic regions of our lives.
Where little else than life itself survives. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow