Folly Quotes

Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.

~ Jane Austen

The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

A thing can be true and still be desperate folly, Hazel.

~ Richard Adams

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.

~ Arundhati Roy

Is it folly to believe in something that is intangible? After all, some of the greatest intangibles are Love, Hope, and Wonder.Another is Deity.The choice to be a fool is yours.

~ Vera Nazarian

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

~ Elizabeth Gaskell

There are two goddesses in your heard. The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, giver her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.

~ Joe Vigil

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

~ Samuel Johnson

A King will have his way in his own hall, be it folly or wisdom.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Not for the first time I find our lives are a shadow, and I am not afraid to say that people who think they have everything figured out and are masters of logic - they are responsible for the greatest folly. No human being is happy. Strike it rich and you are luckier than your neighbor - but happy, never.

~ Euripides

She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her 'Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir.

~ Charles Dickens

A man may indeed be an honest man; but the folly of sacrifice, of virginity, of devotedness, of martyrdom, arises only from faith in the folly of the Cross.

~ Emile Bougaud

The path of life is strewn with many perils and the folly of knowledge is one of the greatest dangers. Wisdom is a treacherous weapon, little master, for it is sundered from compassion. All too often the end of the journey gains more import than it should and the wise become blind to the road and the method of their passing.

~ Robin Jarvis

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.

~ Jane Austen

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.

~ Benjamin Franklin

He's the meanest one. We call him..Byrd the Turd

~ Marthe Jocelyn

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

~ Carl Sagan

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. [He is also a fool.]

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet...

~ Stephen King

War is ever the folly of the ignorant. But I have seen much to convince me some wars must be fought, to the bitterest end if need be.

~ Anthony Ryan

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as the most flagrant of all passions.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.

~ William Faulkner

I will tear this folly from my heart, though every fibre bleed as I rend it away!

~ Walter Scott

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.

~ Alain De Botton

For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the 'natives,' and so in every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him... A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.

~ George Orwell

There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed.

~ Gautama Buddha

The folly and wisdom of men starts when they stop thinking and start acting.

~ David Benedict Zumbo

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

~ Isaac Asimov

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

Sometimes, on duty, if one trusts a stranger, one’s nerves are on edge. What if I am making a mistake!

~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end grows near, each moment becomes more and more valuable and there is no time to waste on recollection. It's important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia, that it is most powerful in early youth , when the volume of life that has passed is quite small.

~ Milan Kundera

It is true. Indeed, that is why I dared not speak. I have yearned to be again at the side of my beloved Arianllyn, and my thoughts are with her now. But had I chosen to return, I would ever wonder whether my choice was made through wisdom or following the wishes of my own heart. I see this is as it must be, and the destiny laid upon me. I am content to die here.

~ Lloyd Alexander

4.10 ANGERAnger makes a dull man witty,But keeps him poor in eternity,A man shrinks when he is angry,And grows in tranquil serenity.[90] - 4When anger flow in the body,You lose your temper – your folly,When distempered – a tragedy,You lose reason – a calamity.[91] - 4

~ Munindra Misra

Each dark conjecture came and for a moment settled like a vulture on Bond's shoulder and croaked into his ear that he had been a blind fool.

~ Ian Fleming

Big mouths and small brains make the strangest noises.

~ Orrin Woodward

A rat in its stealing behavior may manage to steal gold jewelry and to make a nest with it but that does not in anyway qualify the rat to be a millionaire though it's gold pieces be worth that much.

~ Newton Gatambia

We are all very much alike in France in this respect; we still remain knights, knights of love and fortune, since God has been abolished whose bodyguard we really were. But nobody can ever get woman out of our hearts; there she is, and there she will remain, and we love her, and shall continue to love her, and go on committing all kinds of follies on her account as long as there is a France on the map of Europe; and even if France were to be wiped off the map, there would always be Frenchmen left.

~ Guy De Maupassant

As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.

~ Rémy De Gourmont