Life & Wisdom Quote by Geoffrey Chaucer

A medieval mic drop: credibility isn’t granted by the title “teacher,” it’s earned by the grime under your fingernails. Chaucer’s line, spare as a proverb, sets labor before lecture as a moral hierarchy. “Wrought” does more than mean “worked”; it carries the sense of craft, effort, and making something that can be held up to scrutiny. Only after that comes “taught,” the public act of turning experience into guidance. The sentence is a tiny piece of social policing: don’t preach what you haven’t practiced.

The subtext matters because Chaucer writes in a culture thick with authority figures whose power comes from office, not proof. Late medieval England is full of sermonizing clergy, status-bound guilds, and a growing professional class. In that context, the couplet-like rhythm feels like a rebuke aimed at hollow expertise. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-posture. Knowledge, Chaucer implies, should be verified by lived trial, not by rhetoric alone.

Why it works is its clean sequencing. The adverbial “afterward” is the hinge that turns ethics into structure: practice isn’t just preferable, it’s prerequisite. The line flatters the artisan and embarrasses the charlatan in one breath. Read now, it lands as an early argument against performative expertise - the kind that’s fluent in theory and allergic to consequences. Chaucer compresses an entire politics of trust into eight words: make something real first, then you get to tell the rest of us how.