Top 100 The Folly Quotes
#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. Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.
Ambrose Bierce
#5. 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
#6. There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.
Carl Sagan
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Arm yourself with wisdom,
arm yourself with knowledge;
folly is a fierce lion roaming the streets.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#11. Gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.
May Sarton
#13. 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
#14. The ultimate folly is to think that something crucial to your welfare is being taken care of for you.
Robert Breault
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Is there in all the history of human folly a greater fool than a clergymen in politics?
Pat Robertson
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.
A.E. Housman
#27. To think that the world can ever change without changes in our mental models is folly.
Joseph Jaworski
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The folly of one man is the fortune of another.
Francis Bacon
#33. We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out is our own ignorance and folly.
Thomas Cole
#34. Mad are thy subjects all, and even the wisest heart
Straight to folly will fall, at a touch of thy poisoned dart.
Sophocles
#35. If history teaches anything, it teaches that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.
Ronald Reagan
#36. 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
#37. 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
#39. 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
#40. The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.
Thomas Huxley
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. If there is one thing I will not abide it is the folly of a willful pride.
Patrick Rothfuss
#48. 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
#49. It is sheer folly to take unwilling hounds to the chase.
Plautus
#50. [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
#51. Much of the wisdom of one age, is the folly of the next.
Charles Simmons
#52. 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
#53. We're all, in one way or another, the architects of the folly we now find ourselves in.
Mark T. Barnes
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. You cannot commit the folly of underestimating the power of a mother.
Girdhar Joshi
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. I can measure the motions of bodies," Sir Isaac Newton once observed, "but I cannot measure human folly." Nor could he do so as regards his own. He was to lose
John Kenneth Galbraith
#62. The world runs on from one folly to another; and the man who, solely from regard to the opinion of others, and without any wish or necessity of his own, toils after gold, honour, or any other phantom, is no better than a fool.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#63. The mystery of life
its inexplicability, beauty, cruelty, tenderness, folly ... has occupied the greater part of my waking thoughts; and in reverence or rage or irony, as the moment or situation might dictate, I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why.
Theodore Dreiser
#64. 17 A man of c quick temper acts foolishly, and a man of evil devices is hated. 18 The simple inherit folly,
Anonymous
#65. Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.
William Hazlitt
#66. Redmond Howard, a politically aware witness to the Rising and a critic of the rebels, wrote in its aftermath: 'There never was, I believe, an Irish crime -- if crime it can be called -- which had not its roots in an English folly.
Tim Pat Coogan
#68. There are three kinds of fools in this world, fools proper, educated fools and rich fools. The world persists because of the folly of these fools.
Narayanananda Swami.
#69. But I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature
David Hume
#70. The heart swellings convince me of the folly of those who dare to think that any new ties can weaken the first and best of nature.
Stephanie Dray
#71. There is little to be gained from looking backward with disapproval at the consistency of human folly except to notice how each generation thinks itself immune to its predecessor's mistakes.
John H. Makin
#72. Fashion is everywhere and about everything. It is folly, vanity and the fun of it all. It is disguise, innuendo, and cunning. It is mean, gorgeous and ambitious, and definitely the last word for the next few seconds.
Barbara Kruger
#73. If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed. The right of innocent, maritime passage must be preserved for all nations
Lyndon B. Johnson
#74. To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!
Denis Diderot
#75. A rational reaction against irrational excesses and vagaries of skepticism may * * * readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity.
William E. Gladstone
#76. History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive. It knows the names of the king's bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly.
Jean-Henri Fabre
#77. O! Will you be staying,
Or will you be flying?
Your ponies are straying!
The daylight is dying!
To fly would be folly,
To stay would be jolly
And listen and hark
Till the end of the dark
to our tune
ha! ha!
J.R.R. Tolkien
#78. Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
William Hazlitt
#79. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.
Mortimer J. Adler
#80. Anyone who claims they have a genius for war should be regarded as the greatest of fools. For the successful conduct of war is an exercise in the management of folly.
Anthony Ryan
#81. The limitation prompting folly was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#82. The brash unbridled tongue, the lawless folly of fools, will end in pain. But the life of wise content is blest with quietness, escapes the storm and keeps its house secure.
Euripides
#83. Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.
Robert Owen
#85. The greater a man's folly, the greater his enslavement. The wiser a man is, the greater his freedom.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#86. By the word simplicity, is not always meant folly or ignorance; but often, pure and upright Nature, free from artifice, craft or deceitful ornament.
Benjamin Franklin
#87. It begins with skepticism.147 The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something.
Steven Pinker
#88. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists.
G.K. Chesterton
#89. People should get married because they have finally seen the folly of being single: "Oh, this is all just kind of a bad magic trick. I just keep bending over to reach for this wallet on a string. How much longer am I gonna do that?"
Jerry Seinfeld
#90. Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.
Leo Tolstoy
#91. The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.
Henry David Thoreau
#92. Faith, joy, optimism. But not the folly of closing your eyes to reality.
Josemaria Escriva
#93. 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
#94. She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.
Robert K. Massie
#95. Every man, however wise, who begins by worshipping success, must end in mere mediocrity. This strange and paradoxical fate is involved, not in the individual, but in the philosophy, in the point of view. It is not the folly of the man which brings about this necessary fall; it is his wisdom.
G.K. Chesterton
#96. Though the wisdom or virtue of one can very rarely make many happy, the folly or vice of one man often make many miserable.
Samuel Johnson
#97. I have but one rift in the darkness, that is that I have injured no one save myself by my folly, and that the extent of that folly you will never learn.
William Faulkner
#98. The notion that the careless sinner is the smart fellow and the serious-minded Christian, though well-intentioned, is a stupid dolt altogether out of touch with life will not stand up under scrutiny. Sin is basically an act of moral folly, and the greater the folly the greater the fool.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#99. Don't you read or get read to?" The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!
Charles Dickens
#100. Where in the Bible are we told in one verse not to do a thing and in the next to do it?
'Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.' Prov. xxvi. 4.
'Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.' Prov. xxvi. 5.
Samuel Grant Oliphant
