Foolishness Quotes

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day, wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.

~ Elbert Hubbard

Any fool can make a ruleAnd any fool will mind it.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

~ Stephen Fry

I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.

~ Criss Jami

She was reflecting back on a truth she had learned over the years: that people heard what they wanted to hear, saw what they wanted, believed what they wanted.

~ Jeffery Deaver

Causing any damage or harm to one party in order to help another party is not justice, and likewise, attacking all feminine conduct [in order to warn men away from individual women who are deceitful] is contrary to the truth, just as I will show you with a hypothetical case. Let us suppose they did this intending to draw fools away from foolishness. It would be as if I attacked fire -- a very good and necessary element nevertheless -- because some people burnt themselves, or water because someone drowned. The same can be said of all good things which can be used well or used badly. But one must not attack them if fools abuse them.

~ Christine De Pizan

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.

~ Colette

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

~ Hermann Hesse

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.

~ Baltasar Gracián

Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

~ Bertrand Russell

He's acting as foolish as a kitten... but then, everyone's entitled to a little foolishness once in a while.

~ Christopher Paolini

Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?

~ H. Rider Haggard

Our wisdom comes from our experience,and our experience comes from our foolishness.

~ Sacha Guitry

[Y]ou [man] are fool enough, it seems, to dare to war with [woman=] me, when for your faithful ally you might win me easily.

~ Aristophanes

Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else.

~ Tom Robbins

Dzieje kultury wykazują, ze głupota jest siostrą bliźniaczą rozumu, ona rośnie najbujniej nie na glebie dziewiczej ignorancji , lecz na gruncie uprawnym siódmym potem doktorów i profesorów. Wielkie absurdy nie są wymyślane przez tych, których rozum krząta się wokół spraw codziennych. Nic dziwnego zatem, że właśnie najintensywniejsi myśliciele bywali producentami największego głupstwa. / The history of culture shows that foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom. It does not flourish on the fields of pure ignorance but on the fields tirelessly plowed by doctors and professors. Great absurdities do not flourish where one is busy with everyday life. No wonder that sometimes most vigorous thinkers come up with utmost stupidities. (Dziennik 1956, XIX, Thursday)

~ Witold Gombrowicz

Wisdom must yield to superstition's rules,Who arms with bigot zeal the hand of fools.

~ Voltaire

It is a fool of a shepherd who culls his dogs.

~ Jefferson Smith

Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Wise men are not pacifists, they are merely less likely to jump up and retaliate against their antagonizers. They know that needless antagonizers are virtually already insecure enough.

~ Criss Jami

Fear was wisdom in a situation like this, and he was pleased that Folly was obviously intelligent enough to know it. He hoped that she would use the fear to make her cleverer, rather than more foolish, but that was asking much of a human, relatively odd or not.

~ Jim Butcher

Things becomes invisible at the very moment I refuse to grant them importance. And while I am utterly ashamed to admit it, many of the most important things in my life are invisible.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I am a scientist, and as such I am proud to say that being stupid at times is a very human thing. Be proud to be stupid, be proud to be fool. Being a fool is a billion times better than being blinded by the illusion of intellect. I admit I am a fool, but at the very least, with each passing day I do my best to get lesser fool.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Being a fool is a billion times better than being blinded by the illusion of intellect.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Things that are truly great need nothing from me, and to somehow think that they do speaks to my utter lack of greatness.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If I simply look at the map that I’ve so tediously created, it will explain why I’m laying at the bottom of this cliff looking up.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.

~ Richard Feynman

Common sense is one of the most unused commodities available to man.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Only the foolish would think that wisdom is something to keep locked in a drawer. Only the fearful would feel empowerment is something best kept to oneself, or the few, and not shared with all.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

Any fool can break something, criticise someone and tear things apart. It takes a far more skilled, wise and kind soul to build something, nurture someone, fix things and help others thrive over time.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

If you know, you are smart then never try to negotiate your intelligence for the inept.

~ Anas Khan

A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.

~ Molière

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

My father told me once Son, there are only two kinds people that can do whatever they want in life. Kings and fools.. So I decided to be a King.

~ Danilo Vukovljak

GOD is foolishness and GOD is wisdom all at the same time.

~ Temitope Ibrahim

Running’ is driven by panic. ‘Destination’ is driven by thought. And while it’s terribly painful to admit, incessantly pretending that I do the latter doesn’t replace the fact that I’m constantly doing the former.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

To intentionally pass on opportunity is to intentionally pass on living.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The circumstances of the world are so variable that an irrevocable purpose or opinion is almost synonymous with a foolish one.

~ William Seward

In wars, boy, fools kill other fools for foolish causes

~ Robert Jordan