Desiderius Erasmus Quotes

Humility is truth.

Fortune favors the audacious.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Your library is your paradise.

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

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

He who allows oppression shares the crime.

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.

The desire to write grows with writing.

Prevention is better than cure.

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.

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.

Concealed talent brings no reputation.

To know nothing is the happiest life.

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

Women, can't live with them, can't live without them.

No one respects a talent that is concealed.

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.

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

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.