The Praise of Folly

by Erasmus

as many of you as I behold on every side of me seem to me no less than Homer's gods drunk with nectar and nepenthe;

be pleased to lend me your ears, and I'll tell you; not those ears, I mean, you carry to church,

For who can set me out better than myself, unless perhaps I could be better known to another than to myself?

what need was there to have said so much, as if my very looks were not sufficient to inform you who I am? Or as if any man, mistaking me for wisdom, could not at first sight convince himself by my face the true index of my mind? I am no counterfeit, nor do I carry one thing in my looks and another in my breast.

And if they want hard words, they run over some worm-eaten manuscript and pick out half a dozen of the most old and obsolete to confound their reader, believing, no doubt, that they that understand their meaning will like it the better, and they that do not will admire it the more by how much the less they understand it. Nor is this way of ours of admiring what seems most foreign