Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus was born on November 6, 1466, in Rotterdam, a city within the Seventeen Provinces, of which he was a citizen throughout his life. He was a man whose intellectual formation took shape across multiple institutions in different parts of Europe, and whose working life brought together roles that spanned theology, philosophy, humanism, and letters. Latin served as his primary language, the medium through which he composed, translated, and taught across the range of his activities.
Erasmus received his education at a succession of institutions, including the City Gymnasium, the Collège de Montaigu, the College of Sorbonne, the University of Paris, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Turin. This broad academic formation supported the many occupations he pursued: Latin Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, humanist, philologist, pedagogue, latinist, translator, essayist, and university teacher. He also held the position of Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity, a formal academic appointment that placed him within the institutional structures of theological scholarship.
His written output included the Adagia, a work he authored that gathered together a collection of proverbs and sayings. In addition to his work as a writer and essayist, Erasmus worked as a translator and as a Bible translator, applying his skills as a philologist and latinist to the rendering of texts. As a pedagogue and university teacher, he also contributed to the transmission of learning through instruction as well as through the written word.
Erasmus died on July 22, 1536, in Basel, the city where his life came to a close more than seven decades after his birth in Rotterdam. His career had encompassed work as a priest, a philosopher, a humanist writer, and a translator, and his engagement with Latin as both a scholarly and a literary language ran through all of these pursuits. The distance between his birthplace in Rotterdam and his place of death in Basel marks the geographic span of a life conducted across multiple cities and institutions.
Quotes by Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus's insights on:
Nature, more a stepmother than a mother in several ways, has sown a seed of evil in the hearts of mortals, especially in the more thoughtful men, which makes them dissatisfied with their own lot and envious of another's.
The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.
Nature, more of a stepmother than a mother in several ways, has sown a seed of evil in the hearts of mortals, especially in the more thoughtful men, which makes them dissatisfied with their own lot and envious of another's.
If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen.
