Folly Quotes

A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.

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

Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.

The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.

I only did my duty to my country when I tried to oppose the criminal folly of Hitler.

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.

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.

And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

His foe was folly and his weapon wit.

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.

Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.

Although it has been said by men of more wit than wisdom, and perhaps more malice than either, that women are naturally incapable of acting prudently, or that they are necessarily determined to folly, I must by no means grant it.

Some accidents there are in life that a little folly is necessary to help us out of.

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

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.

Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.

Childhood: 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.

It's the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.

At times it is folly to hasten at other times, to delay. The wise do everything in its proper time.

'Tis folly to be wise.

But I think I can sincerely declare that I cheerfully submit myself to every odious name for conscience' sake; and from my soul I despise all those whose guilt, malice, or folly has made them my foes.

The principal axiom in their theory was: Everything can be proved, and everything can be disproved; and in the process, one must profit as much from the folly of others, and from his own superiority, as he can.

All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.

To me, it's the folly of man to make God human.

A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.

The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.

The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion, or delusion.

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.