Top 100 Quotes About Follies
#1. Slavery is the parent of ignorance, and ignorance begets a whole brood of follies and vices; and every one of these is inevitably hostile to literary culture.
Hinton Rowan Helper
#2. Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God ... It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#3. What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised; and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.
Jonathan Swift
#4. I love, I love beauty
and in it I worship my follies,
the ones I found on my own,
and the ones to which I was led
Adonis
#5. We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall
but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.
John Wyndham
#6. The more she thought about it, the more she realised both sides had lost an important alternate perspective. And maybe that was what she'd been created for.
A girl from both worlds, who'd seen the follies and triumphs of each side.
And her job was to shake things up and do something new.
Shannon Messenger
#7. History in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes among which we have now and then met with a few virtues, and some happy times.
Voltaire
#8. Folly pursues us at all periods of our lives. If someone seems wise it is only because his follies are proportionate to his age and fortune.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#9. We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
Marcel Proust
#10. One's conscience reproaches one much more stingingly for one's follies than one's crimes.
Geraldine Jewsbury
#11. Martin Luther was a thoroughly educated man but he wore this lightly. His sermons were littered with only examples and improving tales, drawing equally from the fables of Aesop and the follies of life he observed all around him.
Andrew Pettegree
#12. The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.
Joseph Conrad
#13. [In Christianity] humans are invited to co-create in mutual kenosis with this God who weaves our sins, mistakes, and follies into a pattern, and thus offers us salvation contingent on our willingness to have it.
Maggie Ross
#14. In my time, the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stagecoach.
Oliver Goldsmith
#15. To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength,
Gives, in your weakness, strength unto your foe,
And so your follies fight against yourself.
Fear, and be slain
so worse can come to fight;
And fight and die is death destroying death,
Where fearing dying pays death servile breath.
William Shakespeare
#16. The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
#18. Not perhaps until later life, until the follies, passions, and selfishness of youth have died out, do we ... recognize the the inestimable blessing, the responsibility awful as sweet, of possessing or of being a friend.
Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
#19. Turning, then, from this loathsome combination of church and state, and weeping over the follies of our fellow men, who yield themselves the willing dupes and drudges of these mountebanks, I consider reformation and redress as desperate, and abandon them to the Quixotism of more enthusiastic minds.
Thomas Jefferson
#20. Dreams are a sweet mistake All dreamers must awake.. On then with the dance No backward glance Or my heart will break Never look back NEVER LOOK BACK ... Follies
Stephen Sondheim
#21. Idyllic follies never last, my little Chauvelin ... They come upon us like the measles ... and are as easily cured.
Emmuska Orczy
#22. Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.
Lemony Snicket
#23. The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.
Jonathan Swift
#24. If you would have a boy to despise his mother, let her keep him at home, and spend her life in petting him up, and slaving to indulge his follies and caprices.
Anne Bronte
#25. Men, when their actions succeed not as they would, are always ready to impute the blame thereof to heaven, so as to excuse their own follies.
Edmund Spenser
#26. The young fancy that their follies are mistaken by the old for happiness. The old fancy that their gravity is mistaken by the young for wisdom.
Charles Caleb Colton
#27. We should begin to remind people they are always after your money and if you are on something around average earnings you really don't have that spare capacity to pay for all these follies that Labour keep spending their money on.
John Redwood
#28. All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievious ones.
Benjamin Franklin
#29. Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.
William Hazlitt
#30. Whatever failures I have known, whatever errors I have committed, whatever follies I have witnessed in private and public life have been the consequence of action without thought.
Bernard Baruch
#31. Marriage is a mystery that one would be wise not to solve too hastily.
Marve De Jong, Love And Other Follies Of The Great Families Of Old New York
Anna Godbersen
#32. Trust few men; above all, keep your follies to yourself.
Walter Raleigh
#33. O my God, what must a soul be like when it is in this state! It longs to be all one tongue with which to praise the Lord. It utters a thousand pious follies, in a continuous endeavor to please Him who thus possesses it.
Saint Teresa Of Avila
#34. And aren't the most beautiful follies the ones linked to love?
Irene Nemirovsky
#35. An autobiography should give the reader opportunity to point out the author's follies and misconceptions.
Claud Cockburn
#36. I think comedy and satire are a very important part of democracy, and it's important we are able to laugh at the idiosyncrasies or the follies or vanities of people in power.
Rory Bremner
#37. Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies.
Heinrich Heine
#38. The assumption of time is one of humanity's greatest follies. We tell ourselves that there's always tomorrow, when we can no more predict tomorrow than we can the weather. Procrastination is the thief of dreams.
Richard Paul Evans
#39. It is fortunate that Literature is in no ways injured by the follies of Collectors, since though they preserve the worthless, they necessarily defend the good.
Isaac D'Israeli
#40. The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#41. The follies, vices, and consequent miseries of multitudes, displayed in a newspaper, are so many admonitions and warnings, so many beacons, continually burning, to turn others from the rocks on which they have been shipwrecked.
Thomas Hartwell Horne
#42. There will he nothing more that posterity can add to our immoral habits; our descendants must have the same desires and act the same follies as their sires. Every vice has reached its zenith.
Juvenal
#43. I have been happy ... in believing that ... whatever follies we may be led into as to foreign nations, we shall never give up our Union, the last anchor of our hope, and that alone which is to prevent this heavenly country from becoming an arena of gladiators.
Thomas Jefferson
#44. If we will have the kindness of others, we must endure their follies
Samuel Johnson
#45. Experience is the name men give to their follies or their sorrows.
Alfred De Musset
#46. Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#47. By their own follies they perished, the fools.
Homer
#48. Huh! Mankind always comes up with ideas to make up for the follies of the status quo. But what happens if those ideas are inflexible and fail to respond to the changing times. They end up betraying the people who believed in them.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#49. The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture.
Joseph Addison
#50. We cannot bring ourselves to believe it possible that a foreigner should in any respect be wiser than ourselves. If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidence of our wisdom.
Anthony Trollope
#51. And Tragedy should blush as much to stoop To the low mimic follies of a farce, As a grave matron would to dance with girls.
Horace
#52. Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?
Thomas Jefferson
#53. In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
Albert Camus
#54. The foes from whom we pray to be delivered are our own passions, appetites, and follies; and against these there is always need that we should war.
Theodore Roosevelt
#55. Every man's follies are the caricature resemblances of his wisdom.
John Sterling
#56. But he had something else to curse
his own viscious folly, which now seemed as mad and unaccountable to him as almost all our follies and vices do when their promptings have long passed away.
George Eliot
#57. None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.
Morris West
#58. They are the follies inherent to youth; I make sport of them, and, if you are kind, you will not yourself refuse them a good-natured smile.
Giacomo Casanova
#59. This shall be the last of my benevolent follies, and I will never be kind to anybody again as long as I live.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#61. We can't forever be spending our lives paying for political follies that never gave us anything but always took from us, and I amcontent with the narrowest metes and bounds provided I have peace and quiet for work.
Stefan Zweig
#62. It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in our follies that we are at one.
Jerome K. Jerome
#63. Once, my enemies were those I could see
Now the devil lies deep within me
But angels still nudge me, whispering follies of sin
This war is mine, and mine alone, to win.
Sarah Brownlee
#64. A great nation assailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect: it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets loose.
Romain Rolland
#66. Most history is a record of the triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who make no nuisance of themselves in the world.
Philip Howard, 20th Earl Of Arundel
#68. The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H.L. Mencken
#69. For as health is but one thing, and has been always the same, whereas diseases are by thousands, besides new and daily additions, so all the virtues that have been ever in mankind are to be counted upon a few fingers, but his follies and vices are innumerable, and time adds hourly to the heap.
Jonathan Swift
#70. History, in fact, is no more than a list of the crimes of humanity, human follies and accidents
Edward Gibbon
#71. Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.
Samuel Johnson
#72. Fancy and humour, early and constantly indulged in, may expect an old age overrun with follies.
Isaac Watts
#73. Such is the uncertainty of human affairs, that security and despair are equal follies; and as it is presumption and arrogance to anticipate triumphs, it is weakness and cowardice to prog-nosticate miscarriages.
Samuel Johnson
#74. Flatterers are the worst kind of traitors, for they will strengthen thy imperfections, encourage thee in all evils, correct thee in nothing, but so shadow and paint thy follies and vices as thou shalt never, by their will, discover good from evil, or vice from virtue.
Walter Raleigh
#75. We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.
Voltaire
#76. So long as thou are ignorant be not ashamed to learn. Ignorance is the greatest of all infirmities, and when justified, the chiefest of all follies.
Izaak Walton
#78. All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#79. The budget should be balanced not by more taxes, but by reduction of follies.
Herbert Hoover
#80. I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations.
Mary Wortley Montagu
#81. Clever people are never credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#84. England, a happy land we know,
Where follies naturally grow,
Where without culture they arise,
And tow'r above the common size.
Charles Churchill
#85. I saw "Follies" again at thirty, and you know, I had this great appreciation for [Stephen] Sondheim's brilliance, his lyrics.
Charles Busch
#86. Thus aged men, full loth and slow, The vanities of life forego, And count their youthful follies o'er, Till Memory lends her light no more.
Walter Scott
#87. The history of fiat money is little more than a register of monetary follies and inflations. Our present age merely affords another entry in this dismal register.
Hans F. Sennholz
#88. The test case of the civilizations in America suggests that we are predictable creatures, driven everywhere by similar needs, lusts, hopes, and follies.
Ron Davison
#89. You can hardly expect me to keep fresh in my memory all the follies of which my tongue is guilty.
Anonymous
#90. The poor inhabitant below Was quick to learn and wise to know And keenly felt the friendly glow And softer flame; But thoughtless follies laid him low, And stain'd his name!
Robert Burns
#91. If thou dost still retain the same ill habits, the same follies, too, still thou art bound to vice, and still a slave.
John Dryden
#92. Love is blind
and lovers cannot see
the pretty follies
that themselves commit
William Shakespeare
#94. There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us.
George Eliot
#95. A contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of the past, may be justly reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed.
Samuel Johnson
#96. Unnecessary hustle is one of the American follies. We hustle at both work and play, and consequently enjoy neither to the utmost.
William Feather
#97. In life's last scene what prodigies surprise,
Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise!
From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show.
Samuel Johnson
#98. I had begun with the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and had ended only with the thin hunch that all books are grand follies, destined forever to be misunderstood.
Richard Flanagan
#99. If we could believe that Jesus ... countenanced the follies, falsehoods and charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, ... the conclusion would be irresistible ... that he was an imposter.
Thomas Jefferson
#100. It's impossible to go through life unscathed. Nor should you want to. By the hurts we accumulate, we measure both our follies and our accomplishments.
Christopher Paolini
