Did Geoffrey Chaucer say "The life so short, the craft so long to learn"?

Q: Did Geoffrey Chaucer say "The life so short, the craft so long to learn"?

Yes. This is a light spelling-modernization of the genuine opening line of Chaucer's dream-vision The Parliament of Fowls (c. 1381–82): "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." The wording is Chaucer's own English, but the thought is not original to him — he was rendering the first aphorism of Hippocrates ("Life is short, the art long…") into Middle English.

Who really said it

The life so short, the craft so long to learn

Written by Geoffrey Chaucer c. 1343 – 1400 · English poet, author of The Canterbury Tales

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This is a light spelling-modernization of the genuine opening line of Chaucer’s dream-vision The Parliament of Fowls (c. 1381–82): “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” The wording is Chaucer’s own English, but the thought is not original to him — he was rendering the first aphorism of Hippocrates (“Life is short, the art long…”) into Middle English.

Last verified 16 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“The life so short, the craft so long to learn” Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls (c. 1382), line 1 — modernizing his Middle English "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne," itself adapting Hippocrates' Aphorisms.

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Provenance

The source

Work: The Parliament of Fowls (line 1)
Author: Geoffrey Chaucer
Composed: c. 1381–1382 (Middle English)
Adapting: Hippocrates, Aphorisms I.1

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, / Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering…

Chaucer’s original Middle English opening; “The life so short, the craft so long to learn” is simply the modern-spelling form of the first line.

The Parliament of Fowles at Wikisource

How we trace it

The line is the documented first verse of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”
As Wikipedia’s account of “Ars longa, vita brevis” notes, this line is Chaucer’s English rendering of the opening of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms — and, like the Greek, it puts life first and craft second (unlike the reversed Latin tag).
The underlying maxim — Greek Ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή, Latin ars longa, vita brevis — was repeated across the centuries by Seneca, Chaucer, Goethe and others, which is why the same idea is credited to many names.

Public domain

Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls was written around 1381–82 and has been in the public domain for centuries; the popular “life so short, the craft so long to learn” is merely a spelling-modernization of his line, not a separately copyrighted translation. The Hippocratic original is likewise ancient and long public domain.

Fact-check

Who gets the credit — and who really earned it

This one is unusual: the name most people pin it on is right about the words, but the thought was borrowed. The confusion runs in both directions.

Geoffrey Chaucer correct

The exact English phrasing is genuinely Chaucer’s — it is the modern-spelling form of the first line of The Parliament of Fowls, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”

Hippocrates the real source

Quote sites routinely print the line as a flat “Hippocrates” quotation. That is half right: the thought is the opening of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms (“Life is short, the art long…”), but this particular English wording is Chaucer’s, not a translation of Hippocrates by anyone else.

Chaucer (over-credited) not his line

The fuller form — “Life is short, Art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult” — is sometimes attached to Chaucer’s name, but that is a translation of Hippocrates’ full first aphorism, not a line from Chaucer’s poem.

The seven English words are Chaucer’s, opening The Parliament of Fowls; the idea behind them is Hippocrates’, whom Chaucer was translating.

Context

Why the line has outlived its poem

The Parliament of Fowls is a St. Valentine’s dream-vision about birds choosing their mates, but its very first line has taken on a life of its own as a motto about the gap between a short human span and the long apprenticeship any real skill demands.

Chaucer reached for a maxim already a millennium and a half old: the opening of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, familiar in the Latin tag ars longa, vita brevis. Notably, Chaucer follows the Greek order — life first, craft second — rather than the flipped Latin version most people quote.

The words are Chaucer’s; the wisdom is Hippocrates’.

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Time Work

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

The Parliament of Fowles (full text)Wikisource

The complete Middle English poem; line 1 is the source of the quote.

Ars longa, vita brevisWikipedia

History of the maxim, explicitly identifying Chaucer’s line as its Middle English rendering of Hippocrates.

The Parliament of Fowls (Middle English + glossary)Librarius

Hypertext edition of the poem with line-by-line glossing for the archaic spelling.

The Parlement of FoulesEncyclopaedia Britannica

Scholarly overview of the poem, its date, and its dream-vision form.

A modernisation of the poemPoetry In Translation

A readable modern-English version of the whole poem, useful for the surrounding stanza.

The author

About Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer

c. 1343–1400 · English poet & civil servant, “Father of English Literature”

Geoffrey Chaucer was the most celebrated English poet of the Middle Ages, best known for The Canterbury Tales. Writing in the London vernacular rather than Latin or French, he did much to establish Middle English as a literary language. His dream-vision The Parliament of Fowls, composed around 1381–82, opens with a line adapting the ancient physician Hippocrates’ maxim on the shortness of life against the long labour of mastering a craft.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Parliament of Fowls” (c. 1381–1382), line 1, in The Parliament of Fowles (Wikisource); adapting Hippocrates, Aphorisms I.1.

MLA (9th ed.)

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Parliament of Fowls. Wikisource, c. 1381–1382.

APA (7th ed.)

Chaucer, G. (ca. 1382). The parliament of fowls. Wikisource.

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