Top 100 Quotes About Folly
#1. Early in my business career I learned the folly of worrying about anything. I have always worked as hard as I could, but when a thing went wrong and could not be righted, I dismissed it from my mind.
Julius Rosenwald
#2. Supreme happiness will be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occassion of folly.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#3. I've never met all these people you speak of. And neither, I suspect, have you. They only exist in words we hear. It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their eyes and ears.
Douglas Adams
#4. Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.
Ambrose Bierce
#5. In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.
Adam Smith
#7. People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting.
Edward Weston
#8. There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.
Carl Sagan
#9. It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
Steven Pinker
#11. It is an amiable part of human nature, that we should love our animals; it is even better to love them to the point of folly, than not to love them at all.
Stevie Smith
#12. The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of
other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity."
Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History
of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99
Roger Lowenstein
#13. of light and life, thou Good Supreme! O teach me what is good; teach me Thyself! Save me from folly, vanity, and vice, From every low pursuit; and fill my soul With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure; Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
Benjamin Franklin
#14. Arm yourself with wisdom,
arm yourself with knowledge;
folly is a fierce lion roaming the streets.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#15. When our new armies are ready it seems folly to send them to Flanders, where they will chew barbed wire, or be wasted in futile frontal attacks.
H. H. Asquith
#16. 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
#17. On every important issue life transcends logic and it is folly to depend on reason alone.
Robert Gordis
#18. One's worst enormities remain within, and it is only one's vulgar commonplaces of error and folly that turn into murders and suicides, treasons, infidelities, and betrayals.
Lewis Mumford
#19. Gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.
May Sarton
#21. A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.
James Wolcott
#22. The ultimate folly is to think that something crucial to your welfare is being taken care of for you.
Robert Breault
#24. The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Paul Valery
#25. If to talk to oneself when alone is folly, it must be doubly unwise to listen to oneself in the presence of others.
Baltasar Gracian
#26. To forsake wisdom is to seek folly,
to seek folly is to seek evil,
to seek evil is to be in the arms of the devil,
and to be in the arms of the devil is be in the arms of death.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#27. The greatest piece of folly is that every man thinks himself compelled to hand down what people think they have known.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#28. You sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanliness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly.
George Bernard Shaw
#29. A man of supreme folly: his life flies away while he is merely hoping to enjoy it.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#30. Go! you may call it madness, folly; You shall not chase my gloom away! There 's such a charm in melancholy I would not if I could be gay.
Samuel Rogers
#31. Is there in all the history of human folly a greater fool than a clergymen in politics?
Pat Robertson
#32. 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
#33. A tree which has lost its head will never recover it again, and will survive only as a monument of the ignorance and folly of its Tormentor.
George William Curtis
#35. We may justly condemn ourselves as the greatest sinners we know because we know more of the folly of our own heart than we do of other people's.
William Law
#36. It is folly to anticipate evils, and madness to create imaginary ones.
John Adams
#37. One's conscience reproaches one much more stingingly for one's follies than one's crimes.
Geraldine Jewsbury
#38. We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it.
Leon Kass
#39. Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
Ambrose Bierce
#40. To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.
George Orwell
#41. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.
Thomas Paine
#42. His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.
A.E. Housman
#43. A cold and moist brain is an inseparable companion to folly.
Galen
#44. To think that the world can ever change without changes in our mental models is folly.
Joseph Jaworski
#45. The idea of demonstrating that this unknown something [God] exists, could scarcely suggest itself to Reason. For if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it, and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#46. It is more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work
David Hume
#47. Is it not folly, Spider-like to spin
The Thread of present Life away to win-
What? for ourselves, who know not if we shall
Breathe out the very Breath we now breathe in!
Omar Khayyam
#48. The Steps to Folly as well as Sin are gradual, and almost imperceptible, and when we are once on the Decline, we go down without taking notice on't.
Mary Astell
#50. They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.
Cecil Day-Lewis
#52. The folly of one man is the fortune of another.
Francis Bacon
#53. We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out is our own ignorance and folly.
Thomas Cole
#54. Mad are thy subjects all, and even the wisest heart
Straight to folly will fall, at a touch of thy poisoned dart.
Sophocles
#55. My only books were woman's looks, and folly's all they've taught me.
Thomas Moore
#56. If history teaches anything, it teaches that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.
Ronald Reagan
#57. A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything. Man shall be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#58. Whoever thou art that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly!
Samuel Johnson
#60. A fool is a thorn in his own flesh,
and day after day his wounds worsen.
The more he serves folly,
the more foolish he becomes.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#62. The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.
Thomas Huxley
#63. No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly
C.S. Lewis
#64. We cannot rely on ourselves, for we have learned by bitter experience the folly of self-confidence. We are compelled to look to the Lord alone. Blessed is the wind that drives the ship into the harbor. Blessed is the distress that forces us to rest in our God.
Charles Spurgeon
#65. Opponents of globalisation may see it as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly.
Amartya Sen
#66. It has been long and justly remarked, that folly has ever sought alliance with beauty.
Fanny Burney
#67. Ridiculous modes, invented by ignorance, and adopted by folly.
Tobias Smollett
#68. I think schools, as they are now regulated, the hot-beds of vice and folly, and the knowledge of human nature supposedly attained there, merely cunning selfishness.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#69. Therefore, it seems to me that everything that exists is good - death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly.
Hermann Hesse
#70. We must now and then be joyful in our folly, that we may continue to be joyful in our wisdom!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#71. Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom.
Friedrich Schiller
#72. Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.
Samuel Johnson
#73. Then come at once and pause for breath
In chasing wealth. Remembering death
And death's dark fires, mix, while you may,
Method and madness, work and play.
Folly is sweet, well-timed.
Horace
#74. I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons
Tony Abbott
#75. It is often idle to attempt to oppose ignorance and absurdity by such feeble instruments as truth and reason, and the wisest managers of mankind have generally been most successful when their plan has been to counteract one folly by means of the influence of another.
Jacob Abbot
#76. To love with understanding and without understanding. To love blindly, and to folly. To see only what is loveable. To think only of these things. To see the best in everyone around, their virtues rather than their faults. To see Christ in them!
Dorothy Day
#77. If there is one thing I will not abide it is the folly of a willful pride.
Patrick Rothfuss
#78. Her own folly amused her: she had once thought of herself as smart - but look at where she was.
Larry McMurtry
#80. 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
#82. Let us think often that our only business in this life is to please God. Perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity.
Brother Lawrence
#83. Acknowledge your folly or depart from my dominions.
Anonymous
#85. It is sheer folly to take unwilling hounds to the chase.
Plautus
#86. [H]e had this view of things - that most human activity was utter folly, his own included, and that his existence in the world made others nervous.
David Guterson
#87. Much of the wisdom of one age, is the folly of the next.
Charles Simmons
#88. But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. 'Might makes right,' and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.
Adin Ballou
#89. We're all, in one way or another, the architects of the folly we now find ourselves in.
Mark T. Barnes
#91. The folly and the glory of the world ... the wild, the wise and the wicked ... the hero, the madman, the wanderer and the fool ... the earth, the seas, the wild heavens ... are all part of an endless, unfolding tapestry, woven by time and hemmed by memory.
Brian Holguin
#92. Certainly inside my heart I know degrees of difference. But I can't blame any of these men who share a common fate with me. The big folly of this trial is that it lacks the two men who are to blame for anything which is criminal, namely Hitler and Himmler.
Karl Donitz
#93. Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength. There is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage.
William Hazlitt
#94. Yet we can be sure that whatever fictions exist in Wall Street bookkeeping, the earth is a faithful scribe, a faultless calculator, a superb bookkeeper; we will be held responsible for every bit of our economic folly.
Thomas Berry
#95. You cannot commit the folly of underestimating the power of a mother.
Girdhar Joshi
#96. The dignity of folly
And just as tyranny of truth and science could increase esteem for the lie, a tyranny of prudence could spur the growth of a new kind of nobility.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#97. A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.
Antonin Scalia
#98. Subtract from the great man all that he owes to opportunity, all that he owes to chance, and all that he gained by the wisdom of his friends and the folly of his enemies, and the giant will often be seen to be a pygmy.
Charles Caleb Colton
#99. FOLLY, n. That "gift and faculty divine" whose creative and controlling energy inspires Man's mind, guides his actions and adorns his life.
Ambrose Bierce
#100. She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her 'Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir.
Charles Dickens
