Quote by Giovanni Boccaccio: “It is not given to mankind to stop Fortune's wheel.”

Life will rise and fall regardless of your wishes. Good fortune turns to bad; bad to good. Boccaccio is not advising despair — he is advising acceptance. Fighting against the cycle of change is futile; learning to ride it is wisdom.

Boccaccio completed the Decameron around 1353, just years after the Black Death had killed roughly a third of Europe's population. The plague's randomness — striking rich and poor, virtuous and sinful alike — gave Fortune's wheel particular urgency as a theme.

Italian writer and poet of the fourteenth century best known for the Decameron, a collection of one hundred stories framed by a group of young people sheltering from the Black Death. He was a foundational figure of Renaissance literature and a close friend of Petrarch.