This Is Folly Quotes

#1. The worst of it is, that we can believe God about everything except the present pressing trial. This is folly. Come, my soul, shake off such sinfulness, and trust thy God with the load, the labour, the longing of this present. This done, all is done.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#2. This is folly, Tyrion,' declared Lord Tywin. 'Speak to the matter at hand. You are not on trial for being a dwarf.
'That is where you err, my lord. I have been on trial for being a dwarf my entire life.

George R R Martin

#3. People try to get out of themselves and to escape from the man. This is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they turn into beast; instead of lifting, they degrade themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible heights.

Michel De Montaigne

#4. 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

#5. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

Anonymous

#6. The wish to acquire is in truth very natural and common, and men always do so when they can, and for this they will be praised not blamed; but when they cannot do so, yet wish to do so by any means, then there is folly and blame.

W.K. Marriott

#7. Government price-fixing once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared.

Calvin Coolidge

#8. I am preprogrammed, acting on impulse, dumping a vast memory into a whirling pool and somehow bringing order to it. Building a complex web. I am the spider. This is my venomous bite. I will make them see their folly.

A.L. Davroe

#9. History will prove me right. This is an exercise in folly.

George W. Bush

#10. The thing framed says that nothing framed it; the tongue never made itself to speak, and yet talks against him that did; saying that which is made, is, and that which made it, is not. But this folly is infinite as hell, as much without light or bound as the chaos or the primitive nothing.

Jeremy Taylor

#11. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice.

John Steinbeck

#12. Incredibly, just one mosquito species, Aedes aegypti is responsible for the spread of four known different deadly viral diseases to human beings, yet this mosquito has been allowed to infest densely-populated urban centers.

T.K. Naliaka

#13. How I hate this folly of not believing in the Eucharist, etc.! If the gospel be true, if Jesus Christ be God, what difficulty is there?

Blaise Pascal

#14. Tyranny is usually tempered with assassination, and Democracy must be tempered with culture. In the absence of this, it turns into a representation of collective folly.

John Stuart Mackenzie

#15. To wish to act like angels while we are still in this world is nothing but folly.

Teresa Of Avila

#16. Because this age and the next age
Engender in the ditch,
No man can know a happy man
From any passing wretch,
If Folly link with Elegance
No man knows which is which ...

William Butler Yeats

#17. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.

William Shakespeare

#18. Folly is the only thing that keeps youth at a stay and old age afar off;" as it is verified in the Brabanders, of whom there goes this common saying, "That age, which is wont to render other men wiser, makes them the greater fools.

Erasmus

#19. Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity; there is no cure for this but experience, if indeed there is any cure for it at all.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#20. Death is more merciful than hope itself! There is nothing surprising in this, for death is divinely appointed, while hope is the creation of human folly. Both end in frustration. Am I destined to lead a life of endless frustration?
-(The Beginning and the End)

Naguib Mahfouz

#21. Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

William Shakespeare

#22. This poor world, the object of so much insane attachment, we are about to leave; it is but misery, vanity, and folly; a phantom
the very fashion of which passeth away.

Francois Fenelon

#23. As this is ordinarily the fate of young heads, so reflection upon the folly of it, is as ordinarily the exercise of more years, or of the dear-bought experience of time ...

Daniel Defoe

#24. The rock is a field of battle between our weakness and our strength. We wouldn't touch rock if we were perfectly self-controlled. And he who would climb and live must continuously wage this battle and never let folly win. It's an outrageously demanding proposition. But I never said it was easy.

Royal Robbins

#25. It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

Joseph Addison

#26. There are people who indulge themselves in a sort of lying, which they reckon innocent, and which in one sense is so; for it hurtsnobody but themselves. This sort of lying is the spurious offspring of vanity, begotten upon folly.

Lord Chesterfield

#27. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.

H.L. Mencken

#28. This Old Testament - containing error, folly, absurdity and immorality - is by English statute law declared to be of divine authority, a blasphemy - if there were anyone to be blasphemed - blacker and more insolent than any word ever written or penned by the most hotheaded Freethinker.

Annie Besant

#29. If you seem to be happy in this place of solitude, you will acquire a great reputation for wisdom, and I know, by my own experience, that under the cloak of a great reputation it is possible to hide whole treasures of folly. ("The Story of Princess Zulkais and the Prince Kalilah")

William Beckford

#30. There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

Carl Sagan

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. For we always seem to ourselves righteous and upright and wise and holy - this pride is innate in all of us - unless by clear proofs we stand convinced of our own unrighteousness, foulness, folly, and impurity.

John Calvin

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. Can you blame me, my dear, for looking on this attachment as a romantic folly inspired by that cursed Shakespeare who will poke his nose where he is not wanted?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#38. And this do I say also to the o'erthrowers of statues: It is certainly the greatest folly to throw salt into the sea, and statues into the mud.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#39. 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

#40. Dazzled by brass and scarlet - O, Bathsheba - this is a woman's folly indeed!

Thomas Hardy

#41. God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.

Dan Simmons

#42. 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

#43. This man, lady, hath robb'd many beasts of their particular additions: he is as valiant as a lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant-a man into whom nature hath so crowded humours that his valour is crush'd into folly, his folly sauced with discretion.

William Shakespeare

#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

#45. You can do but one of these things; it is folly to attempt anything else, for there cannot exist a slave confederacy and a free confederacy side by side upon this continent.

John Brough

#46. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same." "And this journey we're on? Is that folly or wisdom?" "The greatest wisdom I know.

Philip Pullman

#47. There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#48. She closed her eyes; and in the sweet slumber lying
her spirit tiptoed from its lodging place.
It's folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying;
for death looked lovely in her face.

Francesco Petrarca

#49. The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights'. It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself.

Queen Victoria

#50. In such societies it is common for ordinary people to seek out celibate spiritual leaders for marriage, love and sometimes sexual guidance. This strikes me as a particularly stupid kind of folly. Nobody ever asks a vegetarian for a recommendation for a steak house

Scott Andrews

#51. A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#52. 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

#53. I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically.

Jane Jacobs