Erasmus Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?

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

Erasmus
It is wisdom in prosperity, when all is as thou wouldst have it, to fear and suspect the worst.

Erasmus
Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.

Erasmus
One nail drives out another; habit is overcome by habit.

Erasmus
The world thought well of my schoolmaster guardian, because he was neither a liar, nor a scamp, nor a gambler; but he was coarse, avaricious, and ignorant; he knew nothing beyond the confused lessons which he taught to his classes. He imagined that in forcing a youth to become a monk he would be offering a sacrifice acceptable to God. He used to boast of the many victims which he devoted annually to Dominic and Francis and Benedict.

Erasmus
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.

Erasmus
At last concluded that no creature was more miserable than man, for that all other creatures are content with those bounds that nature set them, only man endeavors to exceed them.

Erasmus
We should treat them not as food but as condiments, not to sufficiency but for delight.

Erasmus
It will make far less impression on the mind if you say Fleeting and brief is the life of man than if you quote the proverb Man is but a bubble.

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

Erasmus
It might be wiser for me to avoid Camarina and say nothing of theologians. They are a proud, susceptible race. They will smother me under six hundred dogmas. They will call me heretic and bring thunderbolts out of their arsenals, where they keep whole magazines of them for their enemies. Still they are Folly's servants, though they disown their mistress. They live in the third heaven, adoring their own persons and disdaining the poor crawlers upon earth. They are surrounded with a bodyguard of definitions, conclusions, corollaries, propositions explicit, and propositions implicit.... They will tell you how the world was created. They will show you the crack where Sin crept in and corrupted mankind.

Erasmus
No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side.

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

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

Erasmus
I am a lover of liberty. I will not and I cannot serve a party.

Erasmus
Only a very few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and – I shall boldly add – all can be theologians.

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

Erasmus
You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn.

Erasmus
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...

Erasmus
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.

Erasmus
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.

Erasmus
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.

Erasmus
Out of all those centuries the Greeks can count seven sages at the most, and if anyone looks at them more closely I swear he'll not find so much as a half-wise man or even a third of a wise man among them.

Erasmus
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.

Erasmus
Many times what cannot be refuted by arguments can be parried by laughter.

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

Erasmus
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...

Erasmus
It's the generally accepted privilege of theologians to stretch the heavens, that is the Scriptures, like tanners with a hide.

Erasmus
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.

Erasmus