Best 116 quotes of Desiderius Erasmus on MyQuotes

A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie.

A good prince will tax as lightly as possible those commodities which are used by the poorest members of society: grain, bread, beer, wine, clothing, and all other staples without which human life could not exist.

Almost all Christians being wretchedly enslaved to blindness and ignorance, which the priests are so far from preventing or removing, that they blacken the darkness, and promote the delusion: wisely foreseeing that the people (like cows, which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked), would part with less if they knew more.

Amongst the learned the lawyers claim first place, the most self-satisfied class of people, as they roll their rock of Sisyphus and string together six hundred laws in the same breath, no matter whether relevant or not, piling up opinion on opinion and gloss on gloss to make their profession seem the most difficult of all. Anything which causes trouble has special merit in their eyes.

A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.

Anything which causes trouble has special merit in their eyes.

Apothegms are in history, the same as pearls in the sand, or gold in the mine.

As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.

Ask a wise man to dinner and he'll upset everyone by his gloomy silence or tiresome questions. Invite him to a dance and you'll have a camel prancing about. Haul him off to a public entertainment and his face will be enough to spoil the people's entertainment.

Be careful not to be the first to put your hands in the dish. What you cannot hold in your hands you must put on your plate. Also it is a great breach of etiquette when your fingers are dirty and greasy, to bring them to your mouth in order to lick them, or to clean them on your jacket. It would be more decent to use the tablecloth.

Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.

Besides, it happens (how, I cannot tell) that an idea launched like a javelin in proverbial form strikes with sharper point on the hearer's mind and leaves implanted barbs for meditation.

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

By burning Luther's books you may rid your bookshelves of him, but you will not rid men's minds of him.

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

Concealed talent brings no reputation.

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

Do not put chewed bones back on plates. Instead, throw them on the floor for the dog.

Dulce bellum inexpertis. - War is lovely for those who know nothing about it.

Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders.

Everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age?

Fools are without number.

For them it's out-of-date and outmoded to perform miracles; teaching the people is too like hard work, interpreting the holy scriptures is for schoolmen and praying is a waste of time; to shed tears is weak and womanish, to be needy is degrading; to suffer defeat is a disgrace and hardly fitting for one who scarcely permits the greatest of kings to kiss the toes of his sacred feet; and finally, death is an unattractive prospect, and dying on a cross would be an ignominious end.

Fortune favours the audacious.

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.

Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly—because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to god and there’s always the chance that a folly will.

God has administered to us of the present age, a bitter draught and a harsh physician, on account of our abounding infirmities.

Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin.

Great eagerness in the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, or honor, cannot exist without sin.

Heaven grant that the burden you carry may have as easy an exit as it had an entrance. Prayer To A Pregnant Woman

He who allows oppression shares the crime.

He who doesn't sin, is the greatest sinner of all.

Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known.

Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known. This was the sound conclusion of the Academic sceptics, who were the least surly of philosophers.

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

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.

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.

I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.

In short, no association or alliance can be happy or stable without me. People can't long tolerate a ruler, nor can a master his servant, a maid her mistress, a teacher his pupil, a friend his friend nor a wife her husband, a landlord his tenant, a soldier his comrade nor a party-goer his companion, unless they sometimes have illusions about each other, make use of flattery, and have the sense to turn a blind eye and sweeten life for themselves with the honey of folly.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

I put up with this church, in the hope that one day it will become better, just as it is constrained to put up with me in the hope that I will become better.

It hardly needs explaining at length, I think, how much authority or beauty is added to style by the timely use of proverbs. In the first place who does not see what dignity they confer on style by their antiquity alone?... And so to interweave adages deftly and appropriately is to make the language as a whole glitter with sparkles from Antiquity, please us with the colours of the art of rhetoric, gleam with jewel-like words of wisdom, and charm us with titbits of wit and humour.

It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.

It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence.

...it is a sneaking piece of cowardice for authors to put feigned names to their works, as if, like bastards of their brain, they were afraid to own them.

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

It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.

It is wisdom in prosperity, when all is as thou wouldn't have it, to fear and suspect the worst.

It seems to me to be the best proof of an evangelical disposition, that persons are not angry when reproached, and have a Christian charity for those that ill deserve it.