Desiderius Erasmus Quotes

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.

If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen.

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

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

Read first the best books. The important thing for you is not how much you know, but the quality of what you know.

Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revelry is the same flower, when rank and running to seed.

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.

They take unbelievable pleasure in the hideous blast of the hunting horn and baying of the hounds. Dogs dung smells sweet as cinnamon to them.

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

The majority of the common people loathe war and pray for peace; only a handful of individuals, whose evil joys depend on general misery, desire war.

War is sweet to those who haven't tasted it. Dulce bellum inexpertis.

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

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

He who allows oppression shares the crime.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

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

What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.

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

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.

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.

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

The highest form of bliss is living with a certain degree of folly

The chief element of happiness is this: to want to be what you are.

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.

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

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

There is no joy in possession without sharing.

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.

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

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

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

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

Wherever you encounter truth, look upon it as Christianity.

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

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.

Eagles don't catch flies.

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

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

Fortune favours the audacious.

[N]o party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

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

Fools are without number.

Frugality is a handsome income.

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.

Don't give your advice before you are called upon.

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

Time takes away the grief of men.

No one respects a talent that is concealed.

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