Wealth & Money Quote by Desiderius Erasmus

Erasmus doesn’t condemn wealth, pleasure, or honor as such; he condemns the heat around them. “Great eagerness” is the tell: an inner acceleration that turns ordinary human aims into a moral solvent. The line works because it targets motive and tempo rather than the object. You can possess money without being possessed by it, enjoy pleasure without making it a private religion, accept honor without needing the crowd’s oxygen. Eagerness is where the spiritual accounting goes bad.

The subtext is a humanist’s suspicion of fixation. Erasmus lived in a Europe where status and salvation were entangled: patronage politics, church preferment, and the new temptations of commerce all pressed people to perform hunger as virtue. By calling that hunger inseparable from sin, he exposes the self-justifying stories ambition tells. Desire isn’t just a tug; it recruits the imagination, teaching you to rationalize shortcuts, flatter the powerful, step on rivals, launder vanity into “calling.”

He’s also writing in the long shadow of late medieval penitential culture and on the eve of the Reformation’s explosion. The statement reads like a preemptive critique of both corrupt clerics and worldly reformers: if your pursuit is feverish, it will bend your ethics no matter which banner you wave. Erasmus’s genius is to frame sin not as a single act but as a momentum, a drift toward treating people and principles as instruments. The warning lands because it’s diagnostic, not merely moralistic.