Quotes from Desiderius Erasmus

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

Your library is your paradise.

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

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

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

Modern church music is so constructed that the congregation cannot hear one distinct word.

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.

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

Invoked or not invoked, the god is present.

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.

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

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

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.

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 one respects a talent that is concealed.

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

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

The opinion formulated by the Church has more value in my eyes than human reasons, whatever they may be.

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

War is delightful to those who have not experienced it.

He who allows oppression shares the crime.

The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.

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

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