Quotes About Folly

Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.

There is perhaps no surer mark of folly, than to attempt to correct natural infirmities of those we love.

If thou remeber'st not the slightest folly that ever love did make thee run into, thou hast not lov'd

The heart is forever making the head its fool.

We love what we should scorn if we were wiser.

Love, a pleasant folly; ambition, a serious stupidity.

Vanity, not love, has been my folly.

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

Marriage marks the end of many short follies - being one long stupidity.

A dedication to irrationality grows more difficult to renounce with each reiteration of unreason, for the deluded must increasingly face the shame not only of his folly but of the misery it begets. As the tally grows, the likelihood of self-correction diminishes; and the committed one-worlder, now chained to his oars, must insulate himself against both reality and countervailing opinion. He does so handily by demonizing those trying to restore him to sanity.

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Of the stupidity of men there seems no end.

death? Is there such a thing as wisdom, or is what seems such merely the ultimate refinement of folly?

gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.

And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

I believe that, owning to men's folly, a world-government will only be established by force, and will therefore be at first cruel and despotic. But I believe that it is necessary for the preservation of a scientific civilization, and that, if once realized, it will gradually give rise to the other conditions of a tolerable existence.

Wisdom is the focus of the perceptive, but a fool's eyes roam to the ends of the earth. Proverbs 17:24

He feeds on ashes. His deceived mind has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself, or say, "Isn't there a lie in my right hand?" Isaiah 44:20

You can do but one of these things; it is folly to attempt anything else, for there cannot exist a slave confederacy and a free confederacy side by side upon this continent.

To seek after any shape of God, and to assign a form and image to Him, is a proof of man's folly. For God, whosoever he be (if haply there be any other but the world itself), and in what part soever resident, all sense He is, all sight, all hearing: He is the whole of the life and of the soul, all of Himself.

Man is the most intelligent of the animals - and the most silly.

I have heard that in war haste can be folly, but have never seen delay that was wise.

Poor fool, ruining his life for a piece of cloth smeared with mineral paste, for a fake, I had to tell myself, a mere curiosity.

Perhaps the old saying is true and it is not possible to love and be wise.