Top 56 Wise And The Foolish Quotes
#1. A man is judged by his friends, for the wise and the foolish have never agreed.
Baltasar Gracian
#2. He shall rise up and shut the door, it will be in vain for mere professors to knock, and cry Lord, Lord open unto us, for that same door which shuts in the wise virgins will shut out the foolish for ever. Lord, shut me in by Thy grace.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#3. When a wise man is advised of his errors, he will reflect on and improve his conduct. When his misconduct is pointed out, a foolish man will not only disregard the advice but rather repeat the same error.
Gautama Buddha
#4. Only the foolish insist on making their own mistakes when they can learn from the mistakes of others. Only the wise will understand that success leaves clues, and those clues are there for you to use to achieve great things.
John Patrick Hickey
#5. The wise respond.The foolish react.The wise think and then act.The foolish act and then regret.-RVM
R.v.m.
#6. Now the two primal Spirits, who reveal themselves in vision as Twins, are the Better and the Bad, in thought and word and action. Between these two the wise ones chose aright; the foolish not so.
Zoroaster
#7. Most of my failures can be ascribed to the fact that I chose that which was 'easy' over that which was 'right'. And while it's 'right' to admit this to myself, it isn't 'easy.' So, which choice am I going to make this time?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#8. Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them.
C.S. Lewis
#9. The wise know much, but pretend to know little; the ignorant know little, but pretend to know much; and the foolish know nothing, but pretend to know all.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#10. Life is a gift for the wise, a playground for the foolish, a heaven for the rich, and a hell for the poor.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#11. The yearly expenses of the existing religious systemexceed in these United States twenty millions of dollars. Twenty millions! For teaching what? Things unseen and causes unknown! ... Twenty millions would more than suffice to make us wise; and alas! do they not more than suffice to make us foolish?
Frances Wright
#12. God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.
Madeleine L'Engle
#13. God chooses the foolish and weak things of the world to shame the wise and the strong, to show his power and our weakness without him. God's power is perfect in our weakness,
Francine Rivers
#14. Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. Freedom is always wise.
Alexander Meiklejohn
#15. To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
Thomas Carlyle
#16. 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
#17. Golf being a cold, calculating sort of game gives perhaps more scope for folly than any other. We have all the time in the world to make up our minds as to what is the wise thing to do and then we do the foolish one.
Bernard Darwin
#18. A foolish man thinks he knows everything. A wise man knows he doesn't," Finn replied absently, still looking down at the book.
"That's such a fortune-cookie answer," I said with a laugh, and even he smirked at me.
Amanda Hocking
#19. In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has" (Proverbs 21:20, NIV).
Gary Chapman
#20. All men are frauds. Some, the wise, fool only others. Others, the foolish, fool only themselves. And a rare few fool both others and themselves - they are the rulers of Men
R. Scott Bakker
#21. Even the wisest and the best of us can be foolish occasionally.
Dean Koontz
#22. Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish.
Thomas Carlyle
#23. The wise are balanced, and the foolish are extreme.
Sakyong Mipham
#24. The foolish man conceives the idea of 'self.' The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of 'self;' thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.
Buddha
#25. The world was a playground for the foolish and an exalted wonder of love and magic for the wise.
Don Bradley
#26. The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read.
Charles Caleb Colton
#27. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one - we are left with no companion save God. In
James Salter
#28. Upon this build your nation:
The righteous can be trusted;
the wicked must be punished;
the wise must be promoted;
and the foolish must be disregarded.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#29. There is no gap between the ignorant and the wise. A foolish person is a wise person; a wise person is a foolish person.
Shunryu Suzuki
#30. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest.
O. Henry
#31. Would that the majority could inflict the greatest evils, for they would then be capable of the greatest good, and that would be fine, but now they cannot do either. They cannot make a man either wise or foolish, but they inflict things haphazardly.
Socrates
#32. Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Ambrose Bierce
#33. Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish.
John Ray
#34. The others believed me wise because I won, but they didn't know the many instances in which I have been foolish because I lost, and they didn't know that a few seconds before winning I wasn't sure I wouldn't lose.
Umberto Eco
#35. Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#36. God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something.
Anonymous
#37. The only thing I know is that I know nothing, and i am no quite sure that i know that.
Socrates
#38. The foolish undertake a trifling act, and soon desist, discouraged; wise men engage in mighty works, and persevere.
Magha
#39. Error is a hardy plant; it flourisheth in every coil; In the heart of the wise and good, alike with the wicked and foolish; For there is no error so crooked, but it hath in it some lines of truth.
Martin Farquhar Tupper
#40. Silence is the adornment of the wise, and for the foolish the only dignity possible.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#41. Fools and wise-folk are alike harmless. It is the half-wise, and the half-foolish, who are the most dangerous.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#42. 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
#43. She marking them begins a wailing note And sings extemporally a woeful ditty How love makes young men thrall and old men dote How love is wise in folly, foolish-witty Her heavy anthem still concludes in woe, And still the choir of echoes answer so.
William Shakespeare
#44. I wondered at him, so wise and so foolish, to have lived with me all these months and not know that the worst storms break inside a man.
Maria McCann
#45. If we Christians would join the Wise Men, we must close our eyes to all that glitters before the world and look rather on the despised and foolish things, help the poor, comfort the despised, and aid the neighbor in his need.
Martin Luther
#46. Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage - and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope.
Herman Melville
#47. How many times has our conscience firmly prompted us to 'draw the line,' and we showed up with an eraser?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#48. Prosperity hath slain the foolish and wounded the wise.
John Owen
#49. The Wise are silent, the Foolish speak, and children are thus led astray.
Algernon Blackwood
#50. That distrust which intrudes so often on your mind is a mode of melancholy, which, if it be the business of a wise man to be happy, it is foolish to indulge; and if it be a duty to preserve our faculties entire for their proper use, it is criminal. Suspicion is very often an useless pain.
Samuel Johnson
#51. It is contrary to our natural logic that God would choose to use the foolish and the weak to show himself to be wise. We have difficulty seeing how God is praised through our insufficiencies
Gloria Furman
#52. The wise are greatly revered,
the righteous are exceedingly honored,
and the foolish are repeatedly disgraced.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#53. He leaned his head in his hands, as if the burden he bore were too great for endurance. 'You are wise', he said, then raised his head and stared at her with unflinching hatred. 'I wish you were a foolish woman I could despise, damn you!
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#54. A dog to vomit does turn,
A fool to folly but return,
The wise err and learn,
Gaining from each burn.
Munindra Misra
#55. Even the wisest men make fools of themselves about women, and even the most foolish women are wise about men
Theodor Reik
#56. When wisdom gives way to whimsy and ethics fall to excitement, it is highly likely that the ground beneath me will 'give way' and it is I who will 'fall.
Craig D. Lounsbrough