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. Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.
Ambrose Bierce
#3. 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
#4. There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.
Carl Sagan
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. The folly of one man is the fortune of another.
Francis Bacon
#10. 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
#11. If there is one thing I will not abide it is the folly of a willful pride.
Patrick Rothfuss
#12. Much of the wisdom of one age, is the folly of the next.
Charles Simmons
#13. We're all, in one way or another, the architects of the folly we now find ourselves in.
Mark T. Barnes
#14. 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
#15. You cannot commit the folly of underestimating the power of a mother.
Girdhar Joshi
#16. 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
#17. 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.
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Faith, joy, optimism. But not the folly of closing your eyes to reality.
Josemaria Escriva
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. I. cannot stoop to reply to the folly and the slander of every poor Tory partisan who assails me, and I should not have noticed you but for the fact that you are a member of the House of Commons.
John Bright
#26. Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep.
Alexander Hamilton
#27. The folly of men not their hard heartedness was the great cause of the world s poverty.
Edward Bellamy
#28. If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery [of gunpowder] with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind (Chapter 65,p. 68)
Edward Gibbon
#29. [GEICO] got to thinking that, because they were making a lot of money, they knew everything. And they suffered huge losses. All they had to do was to cut out all the folly and go back to the perfectly wonderful business that was lying there.
Charlie Munger
#30. Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Ambrose Bierce
#31. Our worlds made us what we are, and all this pain we suffer is to fix the folly of those who came before, who shaped the world in their image and left us the ruin of their feast.
Pierce Brown
#32. Daphne knows, with equal ease, How to vex and how to please; But the folly of her sex Makes her sole delight to vex.
Jonathan Swift
#34. Men are perplexed by the complexity of life;
angels are perplexed by the folly of men.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#35. My life is like a memento more painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.
Yann Martel
#36. Having found the book which has a message for us, let us not be guilty of the folly of saying we have read it. We might as well say we have breakfasted, as if breakfasting on one day should last us for every day! The book that helps us deserves many readings, for assimilation comes by slow degrees.
Charlotte M. Mason
#37. The folly of mistaking oneself for an oracle is built right into us.
Paul Valery
#38. Reason, too late perhaps, may convince you of the folly of misspending time.
George Washington
#39. A Christian's freedom from anxiety is not due to some guaranteed freedom from trouble, but to the folly of worry and especially to the confidence that God is our Father, that even permitted suffering is within the orbit of His care.
John Stott
#40. Optimumque est, ut volgo dixere, aliena insania frui. And the best plan is, as the popular saying was, to profit by the folly of others. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis
Robert Galbraith
#41. Health is so necessary to all the duties, as well as pleasures of life, that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly.
Samuel Johnson
#42. THERE are no wise few; for in all men rages the folly of the Fall. Take your strongest, happiest, handsomest, best born, best bred, best instructed men on earth and give them special power for half an hour and because they are men they will begin to [perform] badly ...
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#44. It is fortunate that youth never recognizes its ignorance, for if it did it would not find the courage to get the habit of endurance. It is perhaps an instinct of the blood and flesh which prevents this knowledge and allows the boy to become the man who will live to see the folly of his existence.
John Edward Williams
#46. Such will be a great lesson of peace: teaching men that what they cannot take by and election, neither can they take by war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.
Abraham Lincoln
#47. Perhaps I may gain more knowledge out of the folly of this madman than I shall from the teaching of the most wise.
Bram Stoker
#48. Every day I observe more and more the folly of judging of others by ourselves; and I have so much trouble with myself, and my own heart is in such constant agitation, that I am well content to let others pursue their own course, if they only allow me the same privilege.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#49. For if there is one lesson worth retaining from the travails of the Cold War and the miseries it brought in its wake, it is the folly of seeking simple answers to complicated questions. It is a lesson which governments still show no sign of learning.
Philip Short
#50. It is the folly of weak-minded people, to imagine they are what flattery or conceit represents them; and that it is useless for them to be what they are not, since they seem already to have acquired the reputation of it.
Norm MacDonald
#51. Pleasures, riches, honor and joy are sure to have care, disgrace, adversity and affliction in their train. There is no pleasure without pain, no joy without sorrow. O the folly of expecting lasting felicity in a vale of tears, or a paradise in a ruined world.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
#52. Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
Samuel Johnson
#53. To me, it's the folly of man to make God human.
Billy Corgan
#54. The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
E. O. Wilson
#55. My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull.
Yann Martel
#56. [I]t is the folly of a young man to believe that he can pick and choose between what Love and Power offer him, keeping only the Light and leaving behind the Shadows.
Peter Coyote
#57. The folly of humankind is that it believes it is impervious to decay
Tony DiTerlizzi
#58. There ought to be no laws to guarantee property against the folly of its possessors.
William Graham Sumner
#59. The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as "a person.
Wendell Berry
#60. Presumably, such is the folly of human beings, the prospects of intellectual suicide might not stop them from indulging their hatred,
Isaac Asimov
#61. Now, however, I see the folly of attempting to hitch one's wagon to a star with a harness that does not belong to it.
Helen Keller
#62. I do not regret the folly of my youth, but the timidity.
Mason Cooley
#63. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's
Aldous Huxley
#64. I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse.
John Stossel
#65. The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
Joyce Carol Oates
#66. I was pleased to see that even back in the glory days of the Folly people left their mugs of tea on their magical textbooks.
Ben Aaronovitch
#67. Christmas is God saving mankind from the folly of mankind's grandiose sense of greatness.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#68. The folly of endless consumerism sends us on a wild goose-chase for happiness through materialism.
Bryant H. McGill
#69. For when they see the people swarm into the streets, and daily wet to the skin with rain, and yet cannot persuade them to go out of the rain, they do keep themselves within their houses, seeing they cannot remedy the folly of the people.
Thomas More
#70. A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
#71. The day will come, sooner or later, when people will wonder at the necessity of taking all this trouble to expose the folly of a system, so childish and absurd, and yet so often enforced at the point of a bayonet.
Jean-Baptiste Say
#72. Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know theyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.
Thomas Carlyle
#73. There is only one greater folly than that of the fool who says in his heart there is no God, and that is the folly of the people that says with its head that it does not know whether there is a God or not.
Otto Von Bismarck
#74. Christianity has no ceremonial. It has forms, for forms are essential to order; but it disdains the folly of attempting to reinforce the religion of the heart by the antics of the mind.
George Croly
#75. But if the folly of men made one angry one would pass one's life in a state of chronic ire.
W. Somerset Maugham
#77. The principal axiom in their theory was: Everything can be proved, and everything can be disproved; and in the process, one must profit as much from the folly of others, and from his own superiority, as he can.
Moses Mendelssohn
#78. The Folly had last been refurbished in the 1930s when the British establishment firmly believed that central heating was the work, if not of the devil per se, then definitely evil foreigners bent on weakening the hardy British spirit.
Ben Aaronovitch
#79. Children would die of terror if they knew the folly and ignorance of their caretakers.
Mason Cooley
#80. Spurgeon used his wit to provoke laughter in private and in public. He said in one of his sermons, "If by a laugh I can make men see the folly of an error better than in any other way, they shall laugh.
Randy Alcorn
#81. The folly of others is ever most ridiculous to those who are themselves most foolish.
Oliver Goldsmith
#82. Let the politicians debate equal pay and pursue the folly of a war on women in America.
Brian Kilmeade
#84. Would any thing but a madman complain of uncertainty? Uncertainty and expectation are joys of life; security is an insipid thing; and the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.
William Congreve
#85. There, he had seen every thing to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way.
Jane Austen
#86. If the Zionist commit the folly and attack Iran, they will receive a crushing response from the Islamic Republic's armed forces which will lead to their annihilation.
Mohsen Rezaee
#87. With the latitude of unbounded scurrility, it is easy enough to attain the character of a wit, especially when it is considered how wonderfully pleasant it is to the generality of the public to see the folly of their acquaintance exposed by a third person.
Henry Fielding
#88. And now I saw, tho' too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost; and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it.
Daniel Defoe
#89. Since you act as though God is dead, I wanted to join you in the mourning.
The reply of Martin Luther's wife, in full funeral regalia, in trying to illustrate the folly of his depressed state.
Mark Driscoll
#90. It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
Jonathan Swift
#91. For mortal men there is but one hell, and that is the folly and wickedness and spite of his fellows; but once his life is over, there's an end to it: his annihilation is final and entire, of him nothing survives.
Marquis De Sade
#93. Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying Him! That would map out the character of God instead of crying, Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do?
George MacDonald
#94. Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly - because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to god and there's always the chance that a folly will.
Desiderius Erasmus
#95. I think that fact alone levels everything. Slapstick amazes me, the folly of humans today, the Ponzi schemes, giving birth to eight babies at once, it's amazing ... And I know, it's horrible to have your money stolen and all that, but those are amazing stories.
Laurel Nakadate
#96. Thus through the folly of a single hot-headed general, whose offensive spirit was not balanced by judgment, the Empire suffered a blow from which it never recovered-although it had sufficient power of endurance to survive, in a diminished form, for a further four hundred years.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#97. Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.
Ilana Mercer
#98. Love is the folly of men and the wit of God.
Victor Hugo
#99. And I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.
James Lee Burke
#100. The folly which we might have ourselves committed is the one which we are least ready to pardon in another.
Joseph Roux
