Folly Quotes

Anger without power is folly.

Sometimes there are accidents in our lives the skillful extrication from which demands a little folly.

In infants, levity is a prettiness; in men a shameful defect; but in old age, a monstrous folly.

The older a fool is, the worse he is.

Life is hollow without health and freedom. To seek one while ignoring the other is folly.

Reason, too late perhaps, may convince you of the folly of misspending time.

It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans.

It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly.

Vanity, not love, has been my folly.

To believe that everyone is honest is folly, but to believe that no one is honest is worse.

If ridicule were employed to laugh men out of vice and folly, it might be of some use.

Knowing the future is the flower of the Way, and the beginning of folly.

I prefer silent prudence to loquacious folly. [Lat., Malo indisertam prudentiam, quam loquacem stultitiam.]

To stumble twice against the same stone, is a proverbial disgrace. [Lat., Culpa enim illa, bis ad eundem, vulgari reprehensa proverbio est.]

Heed the still small voice that so seldom leads us wrong, and never into folly.

The essence of forgiveness is seeing our humanness and seeing that we all have our limitations and follies.

Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .

When I looked at things for what they are I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of my Self.

There is nothing that one can say about acting, writing, producing or directing that cannot be revoked in the next breath. Nothing is immutable. The logic of one year is a folly of the next.

The shortest follies are the best. [Fr., Les plus courtes folies sont les meilleures.]

Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.

When thou findest thyself scorning another, look then at thy own heart and laugh at thy folly.

The fool,fixed in his folly,may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

If others had not been foolish, we should be so.

O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.

The folly of all follies is to be love sick for a shadow.

To take offence is a great folly, and to give offence is a great folly - I know not which is the greater.

Knowledge without wisdom is double folly.

If to talk to oneself when alone is folly, it must be doubly unwise to listen to oneself in the presence of others.

Fools rush in through the door; for folly is always bold.

By the word simplicity, is not always meant folly or ignorance; but often, pure and upright Nature, free from artifice, craft or deceitful ornament.

Government price-fixing once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared.

Scientific advertising has altered many old plans and conceptions. It has proved many long established methods to be folly

It is more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work

Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly—because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to god and there’s always the chance that a folly will.

To act without knowledge is folly, to know without acting is cowardice.

It's folly that women measure their happiness with the pleasures of the bed, but they do. And when the pleasure cools or their man goes missing, all they once lived for turns dark and hateful.

The intellect of the generality of women serves more to fortify their folly than their reason.

This poor world, the object of so much insane attachment, we are about to leave; it is but misery, vanity, and folly; a phantom--the very fashion of which "passeth away.

Since love is folly, a foolish woman is more dangerous than a wise one.

What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?

Folly growes without watering.

If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.

To believe all men honest is folly. To believe none is something worse.

A man of supreme folly: his life flies away while he is merely hoping to enjoy it.

Working cuts down on both folly and wisdom.

The vanity of loving fine clothes and new fashion, and placing value on ourselves by them is one of the most childish pieces of folly.

Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.

If there is one thing I will not abide it is the folly of a willful pride.

Some people seem born with a head in which the thin partition that divides great wit from folly is wanting.