Quotes About Folly

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

Nothing suits worse with vice than want of sense

People try to get out of themselves and to escape from the man. This is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they turn into beast; instead of lifting, they degrade themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible heights.

The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.

It was then that Miss Brodie looked beautiful and fragile, just as dark, heavy Edinburgh itself could suddenly be changed into a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets. In the same way Miss Brodie's masterful features became clear and sweet to Sandy when viewed in the curious light of the woman's folly, and she never felt more affection for her in her later years than when she thought upon Miss Brodie silly.

Most of us chose to oppose the war as an act of folly by a president who mistook himself for a king, and his British sidekick who wanted to be on the winning side of history. There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.

Gentleness shown once is mercy, shown twice is folly.

a man of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country, but only life to be lived, and under these circumstances his only tie to his fellow men is his controlled folly. Thus

Time does to the body what stupidity does to the soul

el tiempo hace con el cuerpo lo que la estupidez con el alma: lo pudre.

What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,' the prince said, 'is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous

Dazzled by brass and scarlet - O, Bathsheba - this is a woman's folly indeed!

It was Wisdom in the abstract facing Folly in the concrete.

Now the people sneer at me--the very hills and sky seem to laugh at me till I blush shamefully for my folly. I have lost my respect, my good name, my standing--lost it, never to get it again.

And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. —ECCLESIASTES

For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.

The Santa Monica Freeway is traditionally the scene of every form of automotive folly known to man. It is not white and well-bred like the San Diego, nor as treacherously engineered as the Pasadena, nor quite as ghetto-suicidal as the Harbor. No, one hesitates to say it, but the Santa Monica is a freeway for freaks.

like an idiot pitching change into a well that nobody ever said was open for wishing.

With a sense of fulfillment stronger even than the sating of his hunger that morning, for he'd been starved of books much longer than of food, Pico joined the browsers. Inhaling the odor of mildewed hide as if he'd entered a confectionery, fondling the bindings of stippled leather or buckled cloth, running his fingers across the raised letters of the titles as though blind, for a moment he wished he'd saved the coin to buy a book, then giggled at his folly.

And you lay the old folder out. "Hmmmm. I say, we've had a good look at this, Keith, and it does show some promise. By the way, do you make a good cup of tea?" I said yes, but not for you. I walked off with my folio--it was green, I remember--and I dumped it in the garbage can when I got downstairs. That was my final attempt to join society on their terms.

And while he protested that he was more than just a soldier, Churchill recognised in himself an obsession with war, along with a contradictory fear of that obsession. 'Much as war attracts me,' he had written to Clementine from the German army manoeuvres in 1909, '& fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations – I feel more deeply every year … what vile & wicked folly and barbarism it is

Churchill had always had a strong sense of personal destiny: 'Why have I always been kept safe within a hair's breadth of death, except to do something like this?' Now he felt that more than ever that, even if war was folly and barbarism, it was his fulfilment – and opportunity.

What is life but a seires of inspired follies The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance it doesn't come every day.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.