Desiderius Erasmus Quotes

Desiderius Erasmus's page feels like a lively lesson in learning and ethics, enjoyable for anyone who likes thoughtful book talk.

38 quotes

1. Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque, ut pecuniam accpero, Graecus primum autores, deinde vestes emam.

2. In regione caecorum rex est luscus.

3. For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?

4. This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind.

5. Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself.

6. Indeed, a constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies, so that we think of learning as a game rather than a form of drudgery.

7. I have no patience with those who say that sexual excitement is shameful and that venereal stimuli have their origin not in nature, but in sin. Nothing is so far from the truth. As if marriage, whose function cannot be fulfilled without these incitements, did not rise above blame. In other living creatures, where do these incitements come from? From nature or from sin? From nature, of course. It must borne in mind that in the apetites of the body there is very little difference between man and other living creatures. Finally, we defile by our imagination what of its own nature is fair and holy. If we were willing to evaluate things not according to the opinion of the crowd, but according to nature itself, how is it less repulsive to eat, chew, digest, evacuate, and sleep after the fashion of dumb animals, than to enjoy lawful and permitted carnal relations?

8. Believe that you have it, and you have it!

9. Education is of far greater importance than heredity in forming character.

10. I am a citizen of the world, known to all and to all a stranger.

11. I am a lover of liberty. I cannot and will not serve parties.

12. I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

13. It is the friendship of books that has made me perfectly happy.

14. The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.

15. The rules of grammar are crabbed things to many persons... it is important early to instil a taste for the best things into the minds of children, and I cannot see that anything is learned with greater success than what is learned by playing, and this is, in truth, a very harmless kind of fraud, to trick a person into his own profit.

16. There is nothing I congratulate myself on more heartily than on never having joined a sect.

17. They say that the AntiChrist will be born of a monk and a nun. If so, there must already be thousands of AntiChrists.

18. To know nothing is the happiest life

19. Whenever you encounter truth, look upon it as Christianity.

20. Fortune favors the audacious.

21. Dulce bellum inexpertis.

22. Christians would show sense if they dispatched these argumentative Scotists and pigheaded Ockhamists and undefeated Albertists along with the whole regiment of Sophists to fight the Turks and Saracens instead of sending those armies of dull-witted soldiers with whom they've long been carrying on war with no result.

23. When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

24. From hence, no question, has sprung an observation ... confirmed now into a settled opinion, that some long experienced souls in the world, before their dislodging, arrive to the height of prophetic spirits.

25. Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the market place.

26. Retain the wind by compressing the belly.

27. So our student will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, light on every blossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive...

28. By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance.

29. Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?

30. Luther was guilty of two great crimes - he struck the Pope in his crown, and the monks in their belly.

31. What passes out of one's mouth passes into a hundred ears. It is a great misfortune not to have sense enough to speak well.

32. Our determination to imitiate Christ should be such that we have no time for other matters.

33. It is folly alone that stays the fugue of Youth and beats off touring Old Age.

34. By a Carpenter mankind was made, and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade.

35. They may attack me with an army of six hundred syllogisms; and if I do not recant, they will proclaim me a heretic.

36. Invoked or not invoked, the god is present.

37. Eagles don't catch flies.

38. The entire world is my temple, and a very fine one too, if I'm not mistaken, and I'll never lack priests to serve it as long as there are men.