Quotes About Folly

Our highest insights must – and should – sound like follies and sometimes like crimes when they are heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and predestined for them.

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

'Tis folly to be wise.

Silence is the wit of fools.

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.

For when they see the people swarm into the streets, and daily wet to the skin with rain, and yet cannot persuade them to go out of the rain, they do keep themselves within their houses, seeing they cannot remedy the folly of the people.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

I've lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that's a lot of folly to witness up close. Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

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.

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.

It is beyond my comprehension. Love has entered me like a disease, so stealthily I have not seen its approach nor heard its footsteps. My mind recognises the folly of it and yet I still boil and burn with it, precisely as with a fever. To whom shall I turn to be cured? From his damp abitation, I hear Pearce make a Pearcean reply: he does not pause or hesitate before instructing, 'To yourself, Merivel'.

Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.

Human folly is that people are always trying to extract joy from the outside. You may use the outside as a stimulus or trigger, but the real thing always comes from within.

If within the power of another, whom do you blame—atoms or gods? To do either is folly.

It is crazy to want what is impossible. And impossible for the wicked not to do so.

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.

The utter folly of our time is lamentable, that men should think to assist God with human help and to protect the Church of Christ by worldly ambition.

A fool and his words are soon parted

As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly

A man just realizing the fatal extent of his own folly was not likely to be all that rational.

... on every important issue life transcends logic and it is folly to depend on reason alone.

Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.

Where lives the man that has not tried How mirth can into folly glide, And folly into sin!