Quotation Explorer - 'Folly'

Men are perplexed by the complexity of life;angels are perplexed by the folly of men. - Matshona Dhliwayo
Bitter wisdom is better than sweet folly. - Matshona Dhliwayo
Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes. - Bible
Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly. - Plato
The bubbly play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men when glass in hand they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse. - Jack London
The greater a man’s folly, the greater his enslavement. The wiser a man is, the greater his freedom. - Matshona Dhliwayo
A fool cannot be protected from his folly. If you attempt to do so, you will not only arouse his animosity but also you will be attempting to deprive him of whatever benefit he is capable of deriving from experience. Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
To hate a man because he was born in another country, because he speaks a different language, or because he takes a different view of this subject or that, is a great folly. Desist, I implore you, for we are all equally human...Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity.
He who does not seek advice is a fool. His folly blinds him to Truth and makes him evil, stubborn, and a danger to his fellow men. - Kahlil Gibran
Accidental wisdom is better than willful folly. - Matshona Dhliwayo
What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon. - Scarlett Thomas
Folly is strong;wisdom is stronger.Evil is mighty;righteousness is mightier. - Matshona Dhliwayo
Folly plots a fool's death from the moment they become friends. Wisdom bestows blessings upon a wise man from the moment they wed. - Matshona Dhliwayo
Folly and evil are disciples of doom;wisdom and righteousness are servants of life. - Matshona Dhliwayo
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
The most dangerous folly of old people who were once attractive is to forget that they are not so any longer. - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left. - Jane Austen
Understanding is a wellspring of life unto him that hath it: but the instruction of fools is folly. - Anonymous
Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here. - Leo Tolstoy
Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he’d led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self. - Tobias Wolff
He who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks. - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse. - John Quincy Adams
Supreme happiness will be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occassion of folly. - Leonardo da Vinci
I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, And the reason of things, And to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness: And I find more bitter than death, the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands- - Compton Gage
You are beautiful, brilliant, perceptive and pure beyond compare. Your folly lies in being unaware of your inner power and living a mediocre existence. - Pooja Ruprell
Let lessons learnt be like fingers burned. Gentle reminders imploring us to stay away from fire. It is a mark of folly to make the same mistake twice. - karan godara
He who lives without folly is not as wise as he may think. - François de La Rochefoucauld
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 best plan is to profit by the folly of others. - Pliny the Elder
To remark idly is the blind man's folly.
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
If you wouldst live long, live well, for folly and wickedness shorten life. - Benjamin Franklin
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. - Thomas Gray
It's easier to conceal wisdom than folly. - Matshona Dhliwayo
Folly, like its consequences, is dreadful.Wisdom, like its rewards, is great. - Matshona Dhliwayo
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. - Herbert Spencer
A thing can be true and still be desperate folly.
It's wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. - J. R. R. Tolkien
It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire when you live next door. - Publilius Syrus
A King will have his way in his own hall, be it folly or wisdom. - J.R.R. Tolkien
While the people retain their virtue, and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government, in the short space of four years. - Abraham Lincoln
Wisdom in poverty is better than folly in affluence. - Matshona Dhliwayo
She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly. - Robert K. Massie
One must never be eccentric. If one's lot is cast among fools, it is necessary to study folly.
Experience, n. The wisdom that enables us to recognize as an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced. - Ambrose Bierce
A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. - Ann Radcliffe
Whoever thou art that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly! - Samuel Johnson
Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent. - Aldous Huxley
CHILDHOOD, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth -- two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age. - Ambrose Bierce
The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality; all else being the play of thought. But it might as well be our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort. - Irvin D. Yalom
Folly consists not in committing Folly, but in being incapable of concealing it. All men make mistakes, but the wise conceal the blunders they have made, while fools make them public. Reputation depends more on what is hidden than on what is seen. If you can’t be good, be careful. - Baltasar Gracián
The poor fool hadn't realized that if all mankind shares a folly or an illusion, and likes to share it even knowing what it is, then the illusion is much more valuable and fine a kind of thing than the ass who wants to upset it. - John Dickson Carr
What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. - Adam Smith
APRIL FOOL, n. The March fool with another month added to his folly. - Ambrose Bierce
A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything. Man shall be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly. - Friedrich Nietzsche
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.
To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom. - Horace
To forsake wisdom is to seek folly,to seek folly is to seek evil,to seek evil is to be in the arms of the devil,and to be in the arms of the devil is be in the arms of death. - Matshona Dhliwayo
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. - Aldous Huxley
in our age there is no such thing as " keeping out of politics " all issues are political issues , and politics itself is a mass of lies , evasions , folly , hatred and . - George Orwell
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
One man's folly is another man's wife. - Helen Rowland
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
Childhood, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age. - Ambrose Bierce
Anger without power is folly. - German Proverb
The inability to rise above one's inherited ism and ideology makes one live and die a fool, just a folly. - Fakeer Ishavardas
[...] where ignorance is bliss,'Tis folly to be wise. - Thomas Gray
Folly and evil are twins;the devil is their father,and wisdom is their enemy. - Matshona Dhliwayo
Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise. - Samuel Johnson
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. - John Lancaster Spalding
Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong felling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.
His strength for your weakness! His wisdom for your folly! His drive for your drift! His grace for your greed! His love for your lust! His peace for your problems! His joy for your sorrow! His plenty for your poverty! - Major Thomas
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. - Mark Twain
He who lives without folly is not so wise as he imagines. - Francois De La Rochefoucauld
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