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Erasmus
55 quotes
“A speech comes alive only if it rises from the heart, not if it floats on the lips.”
Erasmus (1466–1536) said by 1536 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 130.
“There are monasteries where there is no discipline, and which are worse than brothels — ut prae his lupanaria sint et magis sobria et magis pudica. There are others where religion is nothing but ritual; and these are worse than the first, for the Spirit of God is not in them, and they are inflated with self-righteousness. There are those, again, where the brethren are so sick of the imposture that they keep it up only to deceive the vulgar. The houses are rare indeed where the rule is seriously observed, and even in these few, if you look to the bottom, you will find small sincerity. But there is craft, and plenty of it — craft enough to impose on mature men, not to say innocent boys; and this is called profession. Suppose a house where all is as it ought to be, you have no security that it will continue so. A good superior may be followed by a fool or a tyrant, or an infected brother may introduce a moral plague. True, in extreme cases a monk may change his house, or even may change his order, but leave is rarely given. There is always a suspicion of something wrong, and on the least complaint such a person is sent back.”
Erasmus (1466–1536) first seen 1516 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lambertus Grunnius (August 1516), published in Life and Letters of Erasmus : Lectures delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1894) edited by James Anthony Froude, p. 180
“I have no patience with those who say that sexual excitement is shameful and that venereal stimuli have their origin not in nature, but in sin. Nothing is so far from the truth. As if marriage, whose function cannot be fulfilled without these incitements, did not rise above blame. In other living creatures, where do these incitements come from? From nature or from sin? From nature, of course. It must borne in mind that in the apetites of the body there is very little difference between man and other living creatures. Finally, we defile by our imagination what of its own nature is fair and holy. If we were willing to evaluate things not according to the opinion of the crowd, but according to nature itself, how is it less repulsive to eat, chew, digest, evacuate, and sleep after the fashion of dumb animals, than to enjoy lawful and permitted carnal relations?”
Erasmus (1466–1536) first seen 1519 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Praise of Marriage (1519), in Erasmus on Women (1996) Erika Rummel
“It might be wiser for me to avoid Camarina and say nothing of theologians. They are a proud, susceptible race. They will smother me under six hundred dogmas. They will call me heretic and bring thunderbolts out of their arsenals, where they keep whole magazines of them for their enemies. Still they are Folly's servants, though they disown their mistress. They live in the third heaven, adoring their own persons and disdaining the poor crawlers upon earth. They are surrounded with a bodyguard of definitions, conclusions, corollaries, propositions explicit, and propositions implicit. ...They will tell you how the world was created. They will show you the crack where Sin crept in and corrupted mankind.”
Erasmus (1466–1536) said by 1536 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: as quoted by James Anthony Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1899)
“They [the theologians] will explain to you how Christ was formed in the Virgin's womb; how accident subsists in synaxis without domicile in place. The most ordinary of them can do this. Those more fully initiated explain further whether there is an instans in Divine generation; whether in Christ there is more than a single filiation; whether 'the Father hates the Son' is a possible proposition; whether God can become the substance of a woman, of an ass, of a pumpkin, or of the devil, and whether, if so, a pumpkin could preach a sermon, or work miracles, or be crucified. And they can discover a thousand other things to you besides these. They will make you understand notions, and instants, formalities, and quiddities, things which no eyes ever saw, unless they were eyes which could see in the dark what had no existence.”
Erasmus (1466–1536) said by 1536 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: as quoted by Froude ibid., (1899)