Top 30 Erasmus Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A life without books is unlivable.”

— Erasmus

2. “Power without goodness is unmitigated tyranny, and without wisdom it is destruction, not government.”

— Erasmus

3. “The chief element of happiness is this: to want to be what you are.”

— Erasmus

4. “Dulce bellum inexpertis.”

— Erasmus

5. “We are aliens in this visible world.”

— Erasmus

6. “The desire to write grows with writing.”

— Erasmus

7. “Ego mundi civis esse cupio, communis omnium, vel peregrinus magis.”

— Erasmus

8. “La gente cree que equivocarse es una desgracia; pero es mucho mayor no equivocarse.”

— Erasmus

9. “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.”

— Erasmus

10. “Yet in the midst of all their prosperity, princes in this respect seem to me most unfortunate, because, having no one to tell them truth, they are forced to receive flatterers for friends.”

— Erasmus

11. “Invite a wise man to a feast and he’ll spoil the company, either with morose silence or troublesome disputes. Take him out to dance, and you’ll swear “a cow would have done it better.”

— Erasmus

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

— Erasmus

13. “Turn the pages of history and you will always find the morality of an age reflecting the life of its prince.”

— Erasmus

14. “This is a new one of my own making: I hate a man that remembers what he hears. Wherefore farewell, clap your hands, live and drink lustily, my most excellent disciples of Folly.”

— Erasmus

15. “Do but observe our grim philosophers that are perpetually beating their brains on knotty subjects, and for the most part you’ll find them grown old before they are scarcely young. And.”

— Erasmus

16. “I hear the philosophers opposing it and saying ’tis a miserable thing for a man to be foolish, to err, mistake, and know nothing truly. Nay rather, this is to be a man. And why they should call it miserable, I see no reason; forasmuch as we are so born, so bred, so instructed, nay such is the common condition of us all.”

— Erasmus

17. “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.”

— Erasmus

18. “When I get a little money, I buy books. If any is left, I buy food and clothes.”

— Erasmus

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

— Erasmus

20. “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.”

— Erasmus

21. “When Erasmus was accused of having “laid the egg that Luther hatched,” he acknowledged that he might have done so, but said he had expected quite another kind of a bird. Though he had criticized clerical abuses, he had never wanted to cause a rupture in the church, and he remained in its bosom till his death.”

— Erasmus

22. “It is the mark of a tyrant, indeed an underhand deception, to treat people at large the way that animal trainers customarily treat a wild beast; for their prime concern is to observe what pacifies it or what arouses it, and they provoke or soothe it to suit their own convenience.”

— Erasmus

23. “A remarkable thing happens in the experience of my fools: from them not only true things, but even sharp reproaches, will be listened to; so that a statement which, if it came from a wise man’s mouth, might be a capital offense, coming from a fool gives rise to incredible delight. Veracity, you know, has a certain authentic power of giving pleasure, if nothing offensive goes with it; but this the gods have granted only to fools.”

— Erasmus

24. “If a rock falls on your head, that is bad; but shame, infamy, opprobrium, and curses hurt only so far as they are felt.”

— Erasmus

25. “It is not the office that brings honour to the man, but the man to the office.”

— Erasmus

26. “Priests are said in Scripture to devour the sins of the people; and they find sins so hard to digest that they must have the best wine to wash them down.”

— Erasmus

27. “How fleeting, how brief, how fragile is the life of a man, and how subject to misfortune, assailed already by a multitude of diseases and accidents, buildings which collapse, shipwrecks, earthquakes, lightning! We do not need to add war to our woes, and yet it causes more woe than all the others.”

— Erasmus

28. “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.”

— Erasmus

29. “It is the most deplorable tribute when the succession of an inferior ruler turns his predecessor, who was intolerable while he lived, into someone whose integrity and goodness are sadly missed.”

— Erasmus

30. “Man is a godlike animal, and free twice over: once by nature, and again by his laws.”

— Erasmus

31. “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.”

— Erasmus

32. “Nothing can be called unhappy if it fulfils its own nature, unless you would conclude that a man ought to be pitied because he cannot fly about with the birds, and cannot run on four feet like the whole family of beasts, and is not armed with horns like a bull.”

— Erasmus

33. “What is a mistake in other people is a crime in the prince.”

— Erasmus

34. “For these kind of men that are so given up to the study of wisdom are generally most unfortunate, but chiefly in their children; Nature, it seems, so providently ordering it, lest this mischief of wisdom should spread further among mankind.”

— Erasmus