Quotes By Desiderius Erasmus

He who allows oppression shares the crime.

Prevention is better than cure.

It is wisdom in prosperity, when all is as thou wouldn't have it, to fear and suspect the worst.

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin.

Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders.

Don't give your advice before you are called upon.

The entire world is my temple, and a very fine one too, if I'm not mistaken, and I'll never lack priests to serve it as long as there are men.

A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.

War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.

To know nothing is the happiest life.

Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revelry is the same flower, when rank and running to seed.

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

If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen.

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

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.

Fortune favors the audacious.

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.

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?

Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known.

It's the generally accepted privilege of theologians to stretch the heavens, that is the Scriptures, like tanners with a hide.

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

Your library is your paradise.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Time takes away the grief of men.

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

Luther was guilty of two great crimes - he struck the Pope in his crown, and the monks in their belly.

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.

No one respects a talent that is concealed.