Geoffrey Chaucer — "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th'assay so hard, so sharp the con…"
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th'assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge.
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More from Geoffrey Chaucer
"The world is but a game, and we are but players."
"For if a man be gracious and kynde, He is a verray gentilman, and no other."
"In al the parisshe wif ne was ther noon / That to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon."
"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour;"
"He yaf nat of that text a pulled hen, That seith that hunters ben nat hooly men."
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.