Quote by Giovanni Boccaccio: “Fortune is blind and so are those in her power.”

Luck doesn't see who deserves its gifts or its disasters. And the people who put their trust in fortune — whose happiness depends on how circumstances fall — are equally blind. True security comes from what you build inside yourself, not from circumstances you cannot control.

The Decameron was composed in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death of 1347–1351, which killed roughly half of Florence's population. Boccaccio had witnessed the plague firsthand, and the Decameron opens with a graphic description of its devastation. Its stories emerged from a world that had seen fortune operate with catastrophic indifference.

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.