Life & Wisdom Quote by Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer’s line lands with the plainspoken authority of shop talk, but it’s really a social argument smuggled in as common sense: speed and excellence don’t comfortably share the same bench. The phrasing matters. “No workman” is sweeping, almost legalistic, flattening hierarchy by insisting the rule applies to everyone, from a mason to a poet. Then “whatsoever he be” tightens the net, shutting down the excuse-making that status loves to invent. Chaucer isn’t praising leisurely craft as an aesthetic pose; he’s naming a constraint that anyone who has ever made anything recognizes: attention has a tempo, and haste taxes it.

The subtext is moral as much as practical. Medieval England was built on labor that carried visible risk - bad workmanship could mean a collapsed roof, a failed bridge, a ruined harvest. “Work well” isn’t a vibe; it’s an ethic. Chaucer’s genius is to frame that ethic as inevitable physics rather than piety, making the admonition feel less like scolding and more like a reality check.

Contextually, Chaucer writes in a culture of guilds, apprenticeships, and reputations earned over time. Craft is slow because skill is slow. Read now, it also quietly rebukes the modern romance of hustle: the fantasy that output can be endlessly accelerated without degrading the thing produced. Chaucer offers an older, sharper metric for value: not how fast it ships, but whether it holds.