76 Enlightening Quotes By Desiderius Erasmus, The Great Humanist And Scholar
When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.
Nature, more of a stepmother than a mother in several ways, has sown a seed of evil in the hearts of mortals, especially in the more thoughtful men, which makes them dissatisfied with their own lot and envious of another's.
Everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age?
The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars even amongst powerful princes.
Fools are without number.
Concealed talent brings no reputation.
It's the generally accepted privilege of theologians to stretch the heavens, that is the Scriptures, like tanners with a hide.
Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin.
Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.
Prevention is better than cure.
There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Fortune favors the audacious.
Man is to man either a god or a wolf.
By a Carpenter mankind was made, and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade.
What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?
Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revelry is the same flower, when rank and running to seed.
Nowadays the rage for possession has got to such a pitch that there is nothing in the realm of nature, whether sacred or profane, out of which profit cannot be squeezed.
Great eagerness in the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, or honor, cannot exist without sin.
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.
Women, can't live with them, can't live without them.
Time takes away the grief of men.
It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence.
Don't give your advice before you are called upon.
Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.
In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king.
Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.
It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.
No one respects a talent that is concealed.
To know nothing is the happiest life.
