Success Quote by Desiderius Erasmus

Erasmus slips a wink into what looks, at first glance, like a polite observation about good company. The opening clause stages a careful dodge: he raises the question of whether a party “can have much success without a woman present,” then immediately pretends to outsource judgment. That rhetorical feint is doing real work. It lets him gesture at gender and social pleasure - a loaded topic in any era - while maintaining the humanist’s posture of reasonableness. He isn’t “saying” women are optional; he’s showing how men in mixed company learn to speak indirectly, to flirt with controversy and deny they touched it.

Then he pivots to the thesis he actually wants to smuggle in: folly isn’t the enemy of virtue, it’s the spice that makes life worth tasting. “Seasoned” is the tell. Folly isn’t a collapse into chaos; it’s an ingredient, measured and intentional. The subtext is classic Erasmus: a civilized mind suspicious of moral rigidity, arguing that a little sanctioned nonsense keeps social life from becoming a sermon.

Context matters. Erasmus wrote in a Europe thick with religious anxiety and scholastic seriousness, where public behavior was constantly being policed by moral authorities and private behavior by guilt. His famous Praise of Folly is essentially this line expanded into a worldview: piety without play becomes performative, intellect without levity becomes cruel. The quote works because it flatters the reader as sophisticated - mature enough to admit that “fun” requires a controlled lapse in control - while quietly mocking the dour types who think righteousness is the same thing as joylessness.