Praise of Folly Quotes

“The chief element of happiness is this: to want to be what you are.”
― Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“For anyone who loves intensely lives not in himself but in the object of his love, and the further he can move out of himself into his love, the happier he is.”
― Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

“Just as nothing is more foolish than misplaced wisdom, so too, nothing is more imprudent than perverse prudence. And surely it is perverse not to adapt yourself to the prevailing circumstances, to refuse 'to do as the Romans do,' to ignore the party-goer's maxium 'take a drink or take your leave,' to insist that the play should not be a play. True prudence, on the other hand, recognizes human limitations and does not strive to leap beyond them; it is willing to run with the herd, to overlook faults tolerantly or to share them in a friendly spirit. But, they say, that is exactly what we mean by folly. (I will hardly deny it -- as long as they will reciprocate by admitting that this is exactly what is means to perform the play of life.)”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus , Praise of Folly

“Almost all Christians being wretchedly enslaved to blindness and ignorance, which the priests are so far from preventing or removing, that they blacken the darkness, and promote the delusion: wisely foreseeing that the people (like cows, which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked), would part with less if they knew more...”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Praise of Folly

“...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.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Praise of Folly

“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, Praise of Folly

“The Stoics define wisdom to be conducted by reason, and folly nothing else but the being hurried by passion, lest our life should otherwise have been too dull and inactive, that creator, who out of clay first tempered and made us up, put into the composition of our humanity more than a pound of passions to an ounce of reason; and reason he confined within the narrow cells of the brain, whereas he left passions the whole body to
range in.

Farther, he set up two sturdy champions to stand
perpetually on guard, that reason might make no assault,
surprise, nor inroad ; anger, which keeps its station in
the fortress of the heart ; and lust, which like the signs
Virgo and Scorpio, rules the appetites and passions.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Praise of Folly

“Dve smetnje, uglavnom, ne dopuštaju čoveku da dođe do saznanja: stid kojim se zaslepljuje duh i strah koji u svemu vidi opasnost i obeshrabruje čoveka u njegovoj delatnosti. Ludost sjajno oslobađa svih tih teškoća. Mali broj ljudi zna koliko koristi i ugodnosti donosi preimućstvo da te nikad ničega nije stid i da te nikad nije strah!”
― Erazmo Roterdamski, Pohvala ludosti

“Again what city ever received Plato's or Aristotle's laws, or Socrates' precepts? But,”
― Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“And what is all this life but a kind of comedy, wherein men walk up and down in one another's disguises and act their respective parts, till the property-man brings them back to the attiring house. And yet he often orders a different dress, and makes him that came but just now off in the robes of a king put on the rags of a beggar. Thus are all things represented by counterfeit, and yet without this there was no living.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Praise of Folly

“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, The Praise of Folly

“And so when the whole man will be outside himself, and happy for no reason except that he is so outside himself, he will enjoy some of the ineffable share in the supreme good which draws everything into itself.”
― Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“O operă proastă va plăcea celor mai mulţi. Nimic mai firesc, fiindcă, după cum v-am spus, majoritatea oamenilor sunt proşti. Ori, de vreme ce artiştii cei mai neînsemnaţi sunt întotdeauna încântaţi de micimea lor şi sunt linguşiţi de multime, la ce s-ar mai căzni să dobândească haruri adevărate? Până la urmă acestea doar le-ar spulbera buna părere pe care o au despre ei înşişi, i-ar mai domoli şi le-ar împuţina îndeajuns admiratorii.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Elogiul nebuniei

“For what benefit is beauty, the greatest blessing of heaven, if it be mixed with affectation? What youth, if corrupted with the severity of old age? Lastly,”
― Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“Başınıza taş düşerse bu sahiden kötüdür; ama utanç, şerefsizlik, ayıp ya da hakaret, ancak sen aldırırsan kötü olur. His yoksa kötülük de yoktur. Halk var gücüyle seni ıslıklarken, sen kendini alkışlarsan, bunun ne zararı olabilir? İşte kendini alkışlamanı mümkün kılan tek şey Deliliktir.”
― Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“Sreća voli one koji ne razmišljaju mnogo, voli smelije ljude i one koji sve stavljaju na kocku. Mudrost stvara strašljivce.”
― Erazmo Roterdamski, Pohvala ludosti

“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, Praise of Folly

“I do not like a child that is a man too soon.”
― Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“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, Praise of Folly

“There are others who are rich only in wishes; they build beautiful air-castles and conceive that doing so is enough for happiness.”
― Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“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, In Praise of Folly

“But, to return to my design, what power was it that drew those stony, oaken, and wild people into cities but flattery? For nothing else is signified by Amphion and Orpheus' harp. What was it that, when the common people of Rome were like to have destroyed all by their mutiny, reduced them to obedience? Was it a philosophical oration? Least. But a ridiculous and childish fable of the belly and the rest of the members. And as good success had Themistocles in his of the fox and hedgehog. What wise man's oration could ever have done so much with the people as Sertorius' invention of his white hind? Or his ridiculous emblem of pulling off a horse's tail hair by hair? Or as Lycurgus his example of his two whelps? To say nothing of Minos and Numa, both which ruled their foolish multitudes with fabulous inventions; with which kind of toys that great and powerful beast, the people, are led anyway.”
― Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“no hay goce alguno de las cosas si no se comparten con otros.”
― Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“dulce es la guerra para los que no la han experimentado.”
― Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“what is all this life but a kind of comedy, wherein men walk up and down in one another's disguises and act their respective parts, till the property-man brings them back to the attiring house. And yet he often orders a different dress, and makes him that came but just now off in the robes of a king put on the rags of a beggar. Thus are all things represented by counterfeit, and yet without this there was no living.”
― Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“so sweet a thing it is not to be wise, that on the contrary men rather pray against anything than folly.”
― Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“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, Praise of Folly

“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, Praise of Folly

“Conniving at your friends' vices, passing them over, being blind to them and deceived by them, even loving and admiring your friends' egregious faults as if they were virtues -- does not this seem pretty close to folly?”
― Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“Bir hükümdar öyle bir konumdadır ki, doğruluktan azıcık bel verse bu büyük bir veba gibi yayılarak bütün halkı sarar.”
― Desiderius Erasmus, Deliliğe Övgü