Erasmus Quotes on Knowledge
Erasmus's Praise of Folly (1511) and the broader humanist program — the editions of Jerome and the Greek New Testament, the Adages, the Colloquies — set the standard for Renaissance philological scholarship and the religious reform that prepared (though Erasmus did not himself join) the Lutheran rupture with Rome. The doctrine of Christian humanism — the philosophia Christi recoverable through the disciplined return ad fontes to the original languages and texts of the patristic and biblical sources — frames the whole. The polemical exchange with Luther in On the Freedom of the Will (1524) and Luther's reply On the Bondage of the Will marks the moment at which Erasmus's irenic humanist program proved unable to hold the religious settlement Reformation Europe was about to break apart.
Quotes
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“In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
In regione caecorum rex est luscus. -
Attributed to Erasmus:
“Prevention is better than cure.”
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“When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”
Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque ut pecuniam accepero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam. -
“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.”
Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 114 -
Attributed to Erasmus:
“War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.”
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“Animals only follow their natural instincts; but man, unless he has experienced the influence of learning and philosophy, is at the mercy of impulses that are worse than those of a wild beast. There is no beast more savage and dangerous than a human being who is swept along by the passions of ambition, greed, anger, envy, extravagance, and sensuality.”
De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio (1529), translated by Beert C. Verstraete as On Education for Children , in The Erasmus Reader (University of Toronto Press: 1990), p. 73 -
“No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side.”
The Alchymyst , in Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. -
“The Alchymyst , in Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.”
No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side. -
“I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.”
Letter to an unidentified friend (1489), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 58 -
“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.”
Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 114 -
“You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn.”
Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 114 -
“Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself.”
Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 115