Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1342–1400) was an English poet. This “Father of English Literature” is best known for The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer was also a philosopher, civil servant, courtier, and diplomat.
Born the son of a prosperous wine merchant, Chaucer rose to high office in the court of King Richard II. He traveled around Italy and France, where he was introduced to the works of Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Guillaume de Machaut, and Jean Froissart.
Chaucer is best known for immortalizing the medieval pilgrimage and the diversity of 14th century English society in his Canterbury Tales (c.1387–1400.) Chaucer narrated his masterpiece as a sequence of connected tales narrated by a group of diverse pilgrims going to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. As each pilgrim takes his/her turn to tell their story on the road to Canterbury, Chaucer produced a masterful literary compendium of medieval story genres—romance, fabliau, saints’ legends, fable, and sermon—and living portraits of sophisticated individuals that represent a cross-section of characters from medieval society.
Chaucer’s skills of characterization, humor, and versatility established him as the first great English poet. Chaucer also wrote Troilus and Criseyde (c.1385.)
Not much is known about the end of Chaucer’s life. He is assumed to have died soon after finishing The Canterbury Tales. He is buried in London’s Westminster Abbey.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Geoffrey Chaucer
Idleness is the gate of all harms.—An idle man is like a house that hath no walls; the devils may enter on every side.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Topics: Idleness
Ye been oure lord, dooth with youre owene thyngRight as yow list.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Topics: Wisdom
The guilty think all talk is of themselves.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Topics: Guilt, One liners
My mind to me a kingdom is; such present joys therein I find, that it excels all other bliss that earth affords.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Make a virtue of necessity.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Topics: Acceptance
Nowhere so busy a man as he than he, and yet he seemed busier than he was.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Topics: Work
We know little of the things for which we pray.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Topics: Prayer
He doth all things with sadness and with peevishness, slackness and excusation, with idleness and without good will.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Topics: Idleness
Go, little book; God send thee good passage, and specially let this be thy prayer, unto them all that thee will read or hear, where thou art wrong, after their help to call, thee to correct in any part, or all.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
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
Topics: Habit
Take a cat, nourish it well with milk
And tender meat, make it a couch of silk,
But let it see a mouse along the wall
And it abandones milk and meat and all.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Topics: Cats
Of all the floures in the mede,
Than love I most these floures white and rede,
Soch that men callen daisies in our toun.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Abstinence is approved of God.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Love is blind.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Topics: Love
Of fortune’s sharp adversity, the worst kind of misfortune is this, that a man hath been in prosperity and it remembers when it passed is.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
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