Quotes About Wise Men And Fools

#1. A bad reader soon puts to flight both wise men and fools.

Horace

#2. In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

George Santayana

#3. Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.

Harry Day

#4. Fools dwelling in darkness, wise in their own conceit, are puffed up with vain knowledge, go round and round, staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind.

Gopi Krishna

#5. The master of superstition, is the people; and in all superstition, wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order.

Francis Bacon

#6. Always win fools first. They talk much, and what they have once uttered they will stick to; whereas there is always time, up to the last moment, to bring before a wise man arguments that may entirely change his opinion.

Arthur Helps

#7. Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.

Thomas Hobbes

#8. Euripides was wont to say, silence was an answer to a wise man; but we seem to have greater occasion for it in our dealing with fools and unreasonable persons; for men of breeding and sense will be satisfied with reason and fair words.

Plutarch

#9. As though God had turned away from the wise, and written his decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of
fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror can drive mankind!

Baruch Spinoza

#10. At Athens, wise men propose, and fools dispose.

Alcuin

#11. Only madmen and fools are pleased with themselves; no wise man is good enough for his own satisfaction.

Benjamin Whichcote

#12. Vain-glorious men are the scorn of the wise, the admiration of fools, the idols of paradise, and the slaves of their own vaunts.

Francis Bacon

#13. Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.

Herman Melville

#14. Fools make news, and wise men carry it.

Dorothy Dunnett

#15. Wise men listen and laugh, while fools talk.

Curtis Jackson

#16. Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

Thomas Huxley

#17. What all the wise men promised has not happened and what all the dammed fools said would happen has come to pass.

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne

#18. Always remember this, Henri. Men trade for profit. They are driven by greed. But debt is about fear, and fear is stronger than greed. The true power, the weapon that defeats all others, is debt. Fools search for gold. The wise man studies debt. That is the key to all business.

Edward Rutherfurd

#19. There's a strange something, which without a brain
Fools feel, and which e'en wise men can't explain,
Planted in man, to bind him to that earth,
In dearest ties, from whence he drew his birth.

Charles Churchill

#20. There is nothing by which men display their character so much as in what they consider ridiculous ... Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the half fools and the half wise that the great danger lies.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#21. Greatness, thou gaudy torment of out souls,
The wise man's fetter, and the rage of fools.

Thomas Otway

#22. There are more fools than wise men, and even in a wise man there is more folly than wisdom.

Nicolas Chamfort

#23. A hundred wise men have said in various ways that love transcends the power of death, and millions of fools have supposed that they meant nothing by it. At this late hour in my life I have learned what they meant. They meant that love transcends death. They are correct.

Gene Wolfe

#24. why do I want to appear to be drinking more than I am?'

'Make it a habit. Men in their cups are fools, more often than not. And it can be wise to look the fool at times.

Raymond E. Feist

#25. Fools measure actions, after they are done, by the event; wise men beforehand, by the rules of reason and right. The former look to the end, to judge of the act. Let me look to the act, and leave the end with God.

Joseph Hall

#26. Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#27. Fools and wise men are equally harmless. It is the half-fools and half-wise that are dangerous.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#28. Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.

H.G.Wells

#29. Beware of little expenses; A small leak will sink a great ship, as Poor Richard says; and again, Who dainties love, shall beggars prove; and moreover, Fools make feasts, and wise men eat them.

Benjamin Franklin

#30. We must be careful how we flatter fools too little, or wise men too much, for the flatterer must act the very reverse of the physician, and administer the strongest dose only to the weakest patient.

Charles Caleb Colton

#31. Martyrs have been sincere. And so have tyrants. Wise men have been sincere. And so have fools.

E. Haldeman-Julius

#32. Though the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools,
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

Bob Dylan

#33. Rules were made for fools to follow and wise men to be guided by.

Winston Churchill

#34. Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery elements are made for wise men to contemplate and for fools to pass by without consideration.

Izaak Walton

#35. Even the wisest men make fools of themselves about women, and even the most foolish women are wise about men

Theodor Reik

#36. The fool sees naught but folly; and the madman only madness. Yesterday I asked a foolish man to count the fools among us. He laughed and said, "This is too hard a thing to do, and it will take too long. Were it not better to count only the wise?"

Khalil Gibran

#37. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

#38. It needs a good deal of philosophy not to be mortified by the thought of persons who have voluntarily abandoned everything that for the most of us makes life worth living and are devoid of envy of what they have missed. I have never made up my mind whether they are fools or wise men.

W. Somerset Maugham

#39. No medicine man or wise man knew why one man died and another lived. Wise men themselves often died before fools, and cowards before men who were brave.

Larry McMurtry

#40. Love works in miracles every day: such as weakening the strong, and stretching the weak; making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools; favouring the passions, destroying reason, and in a word, turning everything topsy-turvy.

Margaret Of Valois

#41. Pun: A form of wit, to which wise men stoop and fools aspire

Ambrose Bierce

#42. Also saw that the number of simpleminded men is greater than that of the prudent, and though it is better to be praised by a few wise men and mocked by many fools,

Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra