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Folly Quotes


See also Core English Vocabulary (F) Quotes

A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.

- Antonin Scalia

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

- Winston Churchill

The father`s greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

- Atom Egoyan

Alcohol doesn`t console, it doesn`t fill up anyone`s psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn`t comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.

- Marguerite Duras

A fool`s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

- George Bernard Shaw

Supreme happiness will be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occassion of folly.

- Leonardo Da Vinci

True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.

- Akhenaton

Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.

- Elizabeth Gaskell

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

- Herbert Spencer

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

His foe was folly and his weapon wit.

- Anthony Hope

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

- Samuel Johnson

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

These are not just made-up stories. These were real human beings with real choices ? and some folly, ... And this was the single biggest weapons project in the history of humanity.

- Peter Sellars

Anger without power is folly.

- Abdullah Ocalan

One man`s folly is another man`s wife.

- Abed Hazzem

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.

- Abner Louima

Leave each one his touch of folly; it helps to lighten life`s burden which, if he could see himself as he is, might be too heavy to carry.

- Adam Bretz

All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.

- Adam Carriker

It is folly for an eminent person to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected by it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age, have passed through this fiery persecution. There is no defense against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of concomitant to greatness, as satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph.

- Adam Deadmarsh

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.

- Adeline Casares

The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.

- Adithep Vanabriksha

It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire when you live next door.

- Adm James D. Watkins

Yet ah! why should they know their fate, Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too swiftly flies? Thought would destroy their paradise. No more; where ignorance is bliss, `Tis folly to be wise.

- Adrienne Downey

When knowledge is limited - it leads to folly... When knowledge exceeds a certain limit, it leads to exploitation.

- Ahmad Shah Massood

Always the cat remains a little beyond the limits we try to set for him in our blind folly.

- Akeem Wright

Each is under the most sacred obligation not to squander the material committed to him, not to sap his strength in folly and vice, and to see at the least that he delivers a product worthy the labor and cost which have been expended on him.

- Akira Takei

Away with that folly that her rights would be detrimental to her character - that if she were recognized as the equal to a man she would cease to be a woman!

- Alejandro Freire

To become Christ-like is the only thing in the whole world worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly and all lower achievement vain.

- Alexander Shumsky

The Lord had been very gracious, and spoke peace to me in the time of my distress, and I now most ungratefully turned again to folly; at times I felt sharp reproof, but I did not get low enough to cry for help.

- Allan Keller

It would be stupid tameness, and unaccountable folly, for whole nations to suffer one unreasonable, ambitious and cruel man, to wanton and riot in their misery.

- Allan Moss

We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it.

- Allison Sharp

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.

- Alvina Tan

It is folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.

- Ana Navarro

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.

- Andrae Hernandez

Folly enlarges men`s desires while it lessens their capacities.

- Andre Bakhos

If it be not a sin, an open, flagrant violation of all the rules of justice and humanity, to hold these slaves in bondage, it is indeed folly to put ourselves to any trouble and expense in order to free them.

- Andrea Dziewior

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.

- Andrew Corty

My only books were woman`s looks, and folly`s all they`ve taught me.

- Andrew Corty

The wisdom of one generation will be the folly of the next.

- Angus Graham

Those who get their living by their daily labor . . . have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants which it is a prudence to relieve, but folly to cure.

- Anne Hedges

(But the stakes are rather different from those on the Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion.) It would be a folly, ... were it not so dangerous.

- Babe Parilli

Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man`s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, "Disobedience was man`s Original Virtue."

- Robert Anton Wilson

The most exquisite folly is made of wisdom too fine spun

- Benjamin Franklin

One man`s folly is another man`s wife.

- Helen Rowland

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

- William Blake

Debt is a prolific mother of folly and of crime

- Benjamin Disraeli

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

Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing, through the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.

- William Congreve

It is neither wise nor brave to question God. It is the folly of a prideful heart

- Don Williams, Jr