A thought about guilty minds

“The guilty think all talk is of themselves.”
— “Geoffrey Chaucer”

The quote of the day is a well-known proverb from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, although of course that’s not how he wrote it … modern English being a few generations away. Instead, it’s been passed along from one book (or website) of quotations to another.

Forgive me for going all English major with this post. (My “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf” honours program included a course just on Chaucer, plus two courses on Middle English. Learning how entertaining Chaucer was a revelation that assured me I was in the right place as a student.)

Chaucer might well be surprised to see that he has been getting full credit for the quote, as he actually attributed it to Cato the Elder in the Canon Yeoman’s Prologue … or rather, he has one of his characters do it for us:

For Catoun seith that he that gilty is/ Demeth alle thyng be spoke of hym, ywis.

Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website translates those two lines as:

For Cato says that he who is guilty/ Believes every thing is spoken about him, indeed.

Cato, though quoted by Chaucer’s character, did not quite put it this way. As this post referencing Cato’s Poem on Morality puts it:

This includes the line “Conscius ipse sibi de se putat omnia dici” which can be translated as “The conspirator believes that everything spoken refers to himself.” 

Close to the well-worn words at the top, but not quite.

Chaucer gets the quote credit, then … thanks to the brushups and translations that came with the shift from Middle English to modern.

Speaking of quotations, I have revived the Dot Dot Dot tradition of highlighting them regularly, and you can read them all here.