Erasmus Quotes

How do you like our England, you will say? Believe me when I assure you that I have never liked anything as much before.

Por el contrario, será en verdad prudente, quien, sabiéndose mortal, no quiere conocer más que lo que le ofrece su condición, se presta gustoso a contemporizar con la muchedumbre humana y no tiene asco a andar errado junto a ella. Pero en esto, dirán, radica precisamente la Estulticia. No negaré que así sea, a condición de que se convenga en que tal es el modo de representar la comedia de la vida.

I do not like a child that is a man too soon.

A constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies, so that we think of learning as a game rather than a form of drudgery, for no activity can be continued for long if it does not to some extent afford pleasure to the participant.

A life without books is unlivable

Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?

"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."

Folly is the only thing that keeps youth at a stay and old age afar off;

And therefore suppose that Plato dreamed of somewhat like it when he called the madness of lovers the most happy condition of all others. For he that’s violently in love lives not in his own body but in the thing he loves; and by how much the farther he runs from himself into another, by so much the greater is his pleasure

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

Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.
[Called or not, God is present]

Ma questa, dicono, è appunto follia. Non voglio negarlo, purché in compenso si riconosca che questo è il modo di recitare la commedia della vita.

The tyrannical scheme of Dionysius of Syracuse has been justly censured; he passed a great many laws, piling one on top of another, but he is said to have allowed his people to ignore them and in this way to have made everyone beholden to him. That was not making laws, but setting traps.

Creer que la felicidad del hombre consiste en las mismas cosas es ser loco en extremo. Sólo la opinión que de ellas tenemos nos hace feliz.

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.