The Franklin's Tale, l. 767-770
The Canterbury Tales
“For a story which is nat pleynli told,
But constreynyd undir woordes fewe
For lak off trouthe, wher thei be newe or olde,
Men bi report kan nat the mater shewe.”
Prologue, line 92.
The Fall of Princes
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But constreynyd undir woordes fewe
For lak off trouthe, wher thei be newe or o…" by John Lydgate?
John Lydgate 22
monk and poet 1370–1450Related quotes
Thomas Occleve
(1369–1426) British writer
If those men who to be lovers pretend
Behaved more faithfully and did not lie,
And dreaded to deceive or to offend,
Then women might not choose to pass them by.
But each man's heart's a fickle butterfly
Which can alight on one just a short while.
Can it be wrong in this case to beguile?
"The Letter of Cupid", line 267; vol. 1, p. 83; translation from Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler (eds.) Poems of Cupid, God of Love (Leiden: Brill, 1990) p. 191.
Bram Stoker
book
Dracula
Professor Van Helsing to Dr. Seward
Dracula (1897)
Context: You reason well, and your wit is bold, but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are, that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men's eyes, because they know, or think they know, some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all, and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new, and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young, like the fine ladies at the opera.
John Mandeville
(1300–1372) writer
And Men say in these Countries, that Philosophers some time went upon these Hills, and held to their Noses a Sponge moisted with Water, to have Air; for the Air above was so dry. And above, in the Dust and in the Powder of those Hills, they wrote Letters and Figures with their Fingers. And at the Year's End they came again, and found the same Letters and Figures, the which they had written the Year before, without any Default.
Describing early ascents of Mounts Olympus and Athos.
Source: The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundevile, Kt., Ch. 3
“It's well to be off with the Old Woman before you're on with the New.”
George Bernard Shaw
(1856–1950) Irish playwright
Act II
1890s, The Philanderer (1893)
Horatius, st. 70
Lays of Ancient Rome (1842)
Context: When the goodman mends his armor,
And trims his helmet's plume;
When the goodwife's shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom;
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told,
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.