Erasmus Quotes

Están en un error, ¿qué duda cabe?, los que suponen que la dicha humana se halla en las cosas mismas y no en el concepto que de ellas se ha formado,

What makes a prince a great man, except the consent of his subjects?

nada le importe morir a quien jamás vivió.

And what is all this life but a kind of comedy, wherein men walk up and down in one another's disguises and act their respective parts, till the property-man brings them back to the attiring house. And yet he often orders a different dress, and makes him that came but just now off in the robes of a king put on the rags of a beggar. Thus are all things represented by counterfeit, and yet without this there was no living.

Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books? Even if, taken out one at a time, they offered something worth knowing, the very mass of them would be an impediment to learning from satiety if nothing else

Ya da yaşamın boyunca hem kendine hem de başkalarına karşı duyduğun sorumluluğu terbiyeli şekilde yerine getirebilir misin (çünkü terbiyeli davranış sadece bir yetenek değildir, her eylemin başıdır), elinde her an sana yardıma hazır, şu benim ikizim ve vekilim 'Kendini Beğenmişlik' olmasa? Her fırsatta tam anlamıyla benim rolümü üstlenir kendisi. Çünkü insanın kendini beğenmesi kadar delice bir şey olabilir mi? Kendine hayran olması kadar? Ama insan kendini beğenmese, makul, hoşa giden ve terbiyeli bir davranış sergileyebilir mi?

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...

The working of miracles is old and out-dated; to teach the people is too laborious; to interpret scripture is to invade the prerogative of the schoolmen; to pray is too idle; to shed tears is cowardly and unmanly; to fast is too mean and sordid; to be easy and familiar is beneath the grandeur of him, who, without being sued to and intreated, will scarce give princes the honour of kissing his toe; finally, to die for religion is too self-denying; and to be crucified as their Lord of Life, is base and ignominious.

In fact this type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evil of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind

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

Nicht die haben Bücher recht lieb, welche sie unberührt in den Schränken aufheben, sondern die, die sie Tag und Nacht in den Händen halten.

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

I hate one that remembers what's done over the cup.

But who are they that for no other reason but that they were weary of life have hastened their own fate? Were they not the next neighbors to wisdom? among whom, to say nothing of Diogenes, Xenocrates, Cato, Cassius, Brutus, that wise man Chiron, being offered immortality, chose rather to die than be troubled with the same thing always.

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