Geoffrey Chaucer — "And if that he forbede it, wolde he say, / 'A man may do no synne, but if he may…"
And if that he forbede it, wolde he say, / 'A man may do no synne, but if he may / Nat touche a womman, for al his lyf.'
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More from Geoffrey Chaucer
"For every man that is in swich array, That he ne may nat speke, but he may pray."
"The wise man, though he be old and hoor, Yet wil he lerne, and evermore."
"But al be that he was a philosophre, / Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre."
"For trewely, I dar wel seye, to make it short, He was a verray parfit gentil knyght."
"Full weel she soong the service dyvyne, Entuned in hir nose ful semely."
About Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400)
English poet, civil servant, and the father of English literature; The Canterbury Tales (~1387-1400) is the founding text of English-language storytelling. Closely associated with Giovanni Boccaccio (his Italian predecessor; the Decameron preceded the Canterbury Tales by ~40 years). For an intellectual contrast, see John Wycliffe, English theologian and Lollard reform-movement leader — Wycliffe and Chaucer were near-contemporaries in the same English Christian world — Chaucer's Wife of Bath and Pardoner are the canonical literary defense of fleshly humanity against the Lollard moral austerity that would later become English Puritanism. Earthy storytelling vs proto-Protestant moralism.