Read & Study the Bible Online - Bible Portal
Desiderius Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus


Desiderius Erasmus, was born at Rotterdam, apparently on October 28, 1466, the illegitimate son of a physician's daughter by a man who afterwards turned monk. On his parents' death his guardians insisted on his entering a monastery and in the Augustinian college of Stein near Gouda he spent six years -- it was certainly this personal experience of the ways of the monks that made Erasmus their relentless enemy.

In 1519 appeared the first edition of his Colloquia, usually regarded as his masterpiece. The audacity and incisiveness with which it handles the abuses of the Church prepared men's minds for the subsequent work of Martin Luther.

Erasmus stands as the supreme type of cultivated common sense applied to human affairs. He rescued theology from the pedantries of the Schoolmen, exposed the abuses of the Church, and did more than any other single person to advance the Revival of Learning.
... Show more
I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.
topics: Philosophy  
0 likes
In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king.
topics: Philosophy  
0 likes
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.
0 likes
Luther was guilty of two great crimes - he struck the Pope in his crown, and the monks in their belly.
0 likes
Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.
topics: Revival , Light  
0 likes
Indeed, I disagree very much with those who are unwilling that Holy Scripture, translated into the vulgar tongue, be read by the uneducated, as if Christ taught such intricate doctrines that they could scarcely be understood by very few theologians, or as if the strength of the Christian religion consisted in men's ignorance of it.
0 likes
It's the generally accepted privilege of theologians to stretch the heavens, that is the Scriptures, like tanners with a hide.
topics: Theology  
0 likes
Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders.
topics: Youth  
0 likes
Next, let no one be so fond as to imagine, that I should so far stint my invention to the method of other pleaders, as first to define, and then divide my subject, i.e., myself. For it is equally hazardous to attempt the crowding her within the narrow limits of a definition, whose nature is of so diffusive an extent, or to mangle and disjoin that, to the adoration whereof all nations unitedly concur.
0 likes
To every captive soul and gentle heart into whose sight this present speech may come, so that they might write its meaning for me, greetings, in their lord¬?s name, who is Love. Already a third of the hours were almost past of the time when all the stars were shining, when Amor suddenly appeared to me whose memory fills me with terror. Joyfully Amor seemed to me to hold my heart in his hand, and held in his arms my lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping. Then he woke her, and that burning heart he fed to her reverently, she fearing, afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.
topics: love  
0 likes

Group of Brands