Erasmus Quotes

#1. He who allows oppression shares the crime.

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#2. For what is there at all done among men that is not full of folly, and that too from fools and to fools? Against

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#3. He may lawfully praise himself that lives far from neighbors." Though,

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#4. Yet in the midst of all their prosperity, princes in this respect seem to me most unfortunate, because, having no one to tell them truth, they are forced to receive flatterers for friends.

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#5. There are others who are rich only in wishes; they build beautiful air-castles and conceive that doing so is enough for happiness.

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#6. What is more fawning than a dog? And yet what is more faithful? What is more fond and caressing than a squirrel? But where will you find a better friend to man?

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#7. Conniving at your friends' vices, passing them over, being blind to them and deceived by them, even loving and admiring your friends' egregious faults as if they were virtues -- does not this seem pretty close to folly?

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#8. Bidden or unbidden, God is present.

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#9. Your library is your paradise.

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#10. Do but observe our grim philosophers that are perpetually beating their brains on knotty subjects, and for the most part you'll find them grown old before they are scarcely young. And

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#11. Again what city ever received Plato's or Aristotle's laws, or Socrates' precepts? But,

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#12. For what benefit is beauty, the greatest blessing of heaven, if it be mixed with affectation? What youth, if corrupted with the severity of old age? Lastly,

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#13. It becomes a matter to be put to the test of battle, when someone makes a conjunction of a word which belongs in the bailiwick of the adverbs.

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#14. The desire to write grows with writing.

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#15. But tell me, I beseech you, what man is that would submit his neck to the noose of wedlock, if, as wise men should, he did but first truly weigh the inconvenience of the thing? Or

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#16. Folly is the only thing that keeps youth at a stay and old age afar off;" as it is verified in the Brabanders, of whom there goes this common saying, "That age, which is wont to render other men wiser, makes them the greater fools.

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#17. for self-love is no more than the soothing of a man's self, which, done to another, is flattery. And

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#18. For if by chance some woman wishes to be thought of as wise, she does nothing but show herself twice a fool.

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#19. For what that passes among mortals everywhere is not full of folly, done be fools in the presence of fools?

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