Sunday, March 2, 2008

“Think like the few, speak like the many” (Gaufrei de Vinsauf)

“There are some people who wish to learn, but not to work or to suffer study and pain. That is the way of a cat: it wants a fish but does not want to go fishing. I do not speak to them, but only to any there may be whom the labor of getting knowledge rejoices as much as the knowledge itself does.”

Gaufrei de Vinsauf

Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Trans. Margaret F. Nims. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1967.*

Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova (c. 1210 AD) trans. Jane Baltzell Kopp, in Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press, 1971).