Desiderius Erasmus

In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king.

Only a very few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and – I shall boldly add – all can be theologians.

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.

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.

Man is to man either a god or a wolf.

He who allows oppression shares the crime.

The desire to write grows with writing.

There is nothing I congratulate myself on more heartily than on never having joined a sect.

Young bodies are like tender plants, which grow and become hardened to whatever shape you've trained them.

I put up with this church, in the hope that one day it will become better, just as it is constrained to put up with me in the hope that I will become better.

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

They may attack me with an army of six hundred syllogisms; and if I do not recant, they will proclaim me a heretic.

...it is a sneaking piece of cowardice for authors to put feigned names to their works, as if, like bastards of their brain, they were afraid to own them.

Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?

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