Top 100 Quotes About Follies
#1. Do much wonder that one man, seeing how much another man is a fool when he dedicates his behaviors to love, will, after he hath laughed at such shallow follies in others, become the argument of his own scorn by falling in love:
William Shakespeare
#2. Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.
George Orwell
#3. All of us are seeking a home, and I don't mean where we were born, or where we now live and have things, but where we can do the big things, the right things. Where we belong, where we fit, where we're loved."--Tennessee Williams, "Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog
James Grissom
#4. How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
#5. To a good man, yes, one who knows her in all her moods, who can laugh at her follies and rejoice in her virtues; who will not allow her to give in to her worst instincts; one who knows her, and who, knowing her, will still love her, and love her as she should be loved.
Amanda Grange
#6. All the world's follies," he replied, "turn up in publishing houses sooner or later. But the world's follies may also contain flashes of the wisdom of the Most High, so the wise man observes folly with humility." Then
Umberto Eco
#7. The follies that produced the loss of American virtue following Vietnam begin with continuous overreacting, in the invention of endangered national security, the invention of vital interest, the invention of a commitment which rapidly assumed a life of its own .
Barbara W. Tuchman
#8. How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere.
Bill Vaughan
#9. HERMIT, n. A person whose vices and follies are not sociable.
Ambrose Bierce
#10. The literature hardly helps. You remember it only when you are well, healthy, and in a positive state of mind. And you tend to blame your circumstances and people around you for the outcome of the follies you commit.
Girdhar Joshi
#11. E is betrayed by the cynical sparkle of her eyes, by her sophisticated look. Real ladies do not know the price of things, they like adorable follies; their eyes are like beautiful, hothouse flowers.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#12. With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.
Robert Walser
#13. The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.
Edgar Allan Poe
#15. Who can describe
Women's hypocrisies! their subtle wiles,
Betraying smiles, feign'd tears, inconstancies!
Their painted outsides, and corrupted minds,
The sum of all their follies, and their falsehoods.
Thomas Otway
#16. Men of all ages have the same inclinations, over which reason exercises no control. Thus, wherever men are found, there are follies, ay, and the same follies.
Jean De La Fontaine
#17. There are few enough people with sufficient independence to see the weaknesses and follies of their contemporaries and remain themselves untouched by them.
Albert Einstein
#18. I grew up with "Follies." I saw it when I was fifteen. It was the original production, and of course, that production will never be equaled.
Charles Busch
#19. I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies-thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
D.H. Lawrence
#20. Fashion condemns us to many follies, the greatest is to make oneself its slave.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#21. I wish the state of enthusiasm I am now in may last, for today I FELT there is a God. I have been devotional and my mind has been led away from the follies that it is mostly wrapped up in.
Elizabeth Fry
#22. As a child is indulged or checked in its early follies, a ground is generally laid for the happiness or misery of the future man.
Samuel Richardson
#23. Marriage marks the end of many short follies - being one long stupidity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#24. Whatever folly men commit, be their shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us exercise forbearance; remember that when these faults appear in others it is our follies and vices that we behold.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#25. The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists .
John Maynard Keynes
#26. I long to be in the midst of the children, and have more pleasure in their little follies than in the wisdom of the wise.
Thomas Jefferson
#27. Man often acquires just so much knowledge as to discover his ignorance, and attains so much experience as to regret his follies, and then dies.
William Benton Clulow
#28. We abhor the follies of war, and are not untried in its distresses and calamities. Unmeddling with the affairs of other nations, we had hoped that our distance and our dispositions would have left us free, in the example and indulgence of peace with all the world.
Thomas Jefferson
#30. Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances. It is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.
Voltaire
#31. Though you may be last to discover your follies, be always first to correct them.
Norm MacDonald
#32. Perverse mankind! whose wills, created free, Charge all their woes on absolute degree; All to the dooming gods their guilt translate, And follies are miscall'd the crimes of fate.
Homer
#33. How often I find myself called wrong,' Churchill had written to his wife on 17 April 1924, 'for warning of follies in time.
Martin Gilbert
#35. It is but one of the many follies of luxury which lead men to believe that plenty now is abundance always and fortune is everlasting. Pure folly. My
Stephen R. Lawhead
#36. Let the sexes mutually forgive each other their follies; or, what is much better, let them combine their talents for their general advantage.
Maria Edgeworth
#37. What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.
William S. Paley
#38. In common discourse we denominate persons and things according to the major part of their character; he is to be called a wise man who has but few follies.
Isaac Watts
#39. History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#40. Alas! we see that the small have always suffered for the follies of the great.
[Fr., Helas! on voit que de tout temps
Les Petits ont pati des sottises des grands.]
Jean De La Fontaine
#41. what with the follies and an indecent proposal it's been quite a night
Barbra Streisand
#42. Vulgar people take huge delight in the faults and follies of great men.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#43. And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon have to say about the human record so far? He said, "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." The same can be said about this morning's issue of The New York Times.
Kurt Vonnegut
#44. The follies which a man regrets most, in his life, are those he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.
Helen Rowland
#45. There is a rabble among the gentry as well as the commonalty; a sort of plebeian heads whose fancy moves with the same wheel as these men?in the same level with mechanics, though their fortunes do sometimes gild their infirmities and their purses compound for their follies.
Thomas Browne
#46. Do not feel bad because of it. 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 accomplishment.
Christopher Paolini
#47. For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more
remembering my own sins and follies; and realize that men's hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#48. America is a fortunate country. She grows by the follies of our European nations.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#49. Look now how mortals are blaming the gods, for they say that evils come from us, but in fact they themselves have woes beyond their share because of their own follies.
Homer
#51. I have never, in all my various travels, seen but two sorts of people I mean men and women, who always have been, and ever will be, the same. The same vices and the same follies have been the fruit of all ages, though sometimes under different names.
Mary Wortley Montagu
#52. Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
William Faulkner
#53. We love and we value peace; we know its blessings from experience. We abhor the follies of war, and are not untried in its distresses and calamities.
Thomas Jefferson
#54. Be kind to yourself, dear - to our innocent follies.
Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance.
You will come to see that all evolves us.
Rumi
#55. Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.
Moliere
#56. Quite apart from the fact that we usually pay so dearly for our follies, we should be generous about them, to ourselves and others. Yes, we always pay for them, and sometimes the smallest indiscretions cost as much as the largest.
Irene Nemirovsky
#57. The wise will hide your follies and help you learn, but the wicked ones will gossip about it with scoundrels.
Aniruddha Sastikar
#58. One day History will pass judgment on each of the nations at war; she will weigh their measure of errors, lies, and heinous follies. Let us try to make ours light before her!
Romain Rolland
#59. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.
Jane Austen
#60. I couldn't live without the genius of Stephen Sondheim, be it not just West Side Story,but Follies,Company,Sweeney Todd,Passion.You can go on and on.
Cornel West
#62. A man loses his illusions first, his teeth second, and his follies last.
Helen Rowland
#63. I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offences against myself ... My good opinion once lost is lost forever. - Fitzwilliam Darcy
Jane Austen
#64. But I've been dead much longer than I lived, and I have had the chance to educate myself in that that I lacked in life. I wasn't stupid when I lived, just ignorant. There's a lot to learn, simply by watching the follies of the living.
Piers Anthony
#65. The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#66. O woman! woman! thou shouldest have few sins of thine own to answer for! Thou art the author of such a book of follies in a man that it would need the tears of all the angels to blot the record out.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#67. We should treat with indulgence every human folly,
failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have
before us are simply our own failings, follies, and vices.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#68. History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon
#69. To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.
Oscar Wilde
#70. to be so honestly blind to the follies and
Jane Austen
#72. Mike Stanton is our preeminent aficionado and raconteur of Rhode Island's flamboyantly criminal political follies, and The Prince of Providence is the chronicle of a great American rogue, Mayor Buddy Cianci - a paragon of charisma and corruption.
Philip Gourevitch
#73. The world is a chessboard, Madam, on which we play out our ploys and follies. You are the Queen, of course. Your moves are the strongest. For myself, I claim only to be a knight, advancing in a crooked progress. Do we move ourselves, do you think, or does a great gloved hand place on our squares
Catherine Fisher
#74. There are certain people fated to be fools; they not only commit follies by choice, but are even constrained to do so by fortune.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#75. What is tolerance? It is a necessary consequence of humanity. We are all fallible, let us then pardon each other's follies. This is the first principle of natural right.
Voltaire
#76. You desire to be learned, wealthy, and great, without labor; it is one of the follies still extant in the world.
George Pope Morris
#77. Strange secrets are let out by Death Who blabs so oft the follies of this world.
Benjamin Franklin
#78. One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance 'do the right thing.' Well, as many have discovered, you don't really know what you'll do in the dark till the lights go out.
James Carlos Blake
#79. And others' follies teach us not,
Nor much their wisdom teaches,
And most, of sterling worth, is what
Our own experience preaches.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#80. There is no man so great as not to have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness. Our virtues are the dupes, and often only the plaything of our follies.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#81. Experience increases our wisdom but doesn't reduce our follies.
Josh Billings
#82. I was thrilled to be rehired for the 1919 'Follies.' Mr. Ziegfeld himself hired me. To me, that particular 'Follies' was his greatest 'Follies' of all - not because I was in the show, but because of the great cast and memorable music.
Doris Eaton Travis
#83. Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#84. Many short follies - that is called love by you. And your marriage putteth an end to many short follies, with one long stupidity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#85. SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.
Ambrose Bierce
#86. I am sensible that he who means to do mankind a real service must set down with the determination of putting up, and bearing with all their faults, follies, prejudices and mistakes until he can convince them that he is right.
Thomas Paine
#87. A chain of follies had put him there: Call's abrupt decision to become a cattleman and his own decision, equally abrupt, to try and rescue a girl foolish enough to be taken in by Jake Spoon. None of it was sensible, yet he had to admit there was something about such follies that he liked.
Larry McMurtry
#89. Nineteen twentieths of [mankind is] opaque and unenlightened. Intimacy with most people will make you acquainted with vices and errors and follies enough to make you despise them.
John Adams
#90. What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
Julian Barnes
#91. Traffic with the world is laid upon us for chastening, and for the testing of our vocation. The grace of God is not endangered by the follies or the wickedness of men.
Ellis Peters
#92. I have no temptation to vote, to campaign, to try and stop a candidate who promises new follies.
Harry Browne
#93. Accounting is a big subject and there are huge forces in play. The entire momentum of existing thinking and existing custom is in a direction that allows terrible follies to happen, and the terrible follies have terrible consequences.
Charlie Munger
#94. Many brief follies
that is what you call love. And your marriage puts an end to many brief follies, with a single long stupidity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#95. Press on! If Fortune play thee false To-day, tomorrow she'll be true; Whom now she sinks she now exalts, Taking old gifts and granting new, The wisdom of the present hour Makes up the follies past and gone; To weakness, strength succeeds, and power From frailty springs! Press on, press on!
Benjamin
#96. I knew very well that this hope was chimerical. I was like a pauper who mingles fewer tears with his dry bread if he tells himself that at any moment a stranger will bequeath to him his fortune. We must all, in order to make reality more tolerable, keep alive in us a few little follies.
Marcel Proust
#97. Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#99. 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
#100. Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.
Carl Sandburg
