Quotes About Folly

To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic.

It would not have made a good book, I think. It would have been a folly. Its best telling was in these paragraphs: they contain all the ironies a tome would have contained, and waste less ink.

yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident-like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt.

I've seen more trouble come from long engagements than from any other forms of human folly.

But if one day you do not come after breakfast, if one day I see you in some looking-glass perhaps looking after another, if the telephone buzzes and buzzes in your empty room, I shall then, after unspeakable anguish, I shall then - for there is no end to the folly of the human heart - seek another, find another, you.

O vocables of love,The end of an end is an echo,A last cry follows a last cry.Finality of finalityIs perfection's touch of folly.

Every age has its peculiar folly—some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.

Our love had begun in folly, and ended in madness!

May the Devil carry away these idiots!

Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities we possess or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction or notoriety, even vice and infamy.

Love turns the sensible stupid and the shy wild.

Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly: and they mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain. Had they ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart, they would exchange for it all the frigid speculations of their lives...

How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere.

Richard Whitney wrote his own requiem for the Crash. "A thing compounded of both wisdom and folly, of both heroism and fright, of stubborn persistence and impatient irresolution, of tragically shattered hopes and ambitions and of incongruous and unique episodes not without at times a certain humorous aspect.

Innocence is a kind of insanity

It is the folly of men to believe that they are great players on the stage of history, that their actions might affect the grand procession that is the pasage of time.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

He waited for his cup to be filled, then added softly, "We will pick our way through the shards of broken objects that folly leaves behind. And some of what breaks will be very beautiful.

Think of sweet and chocolate, Left to folly or to fate, Whom the higher gods forgot, Whom the lower gods berate; Physical and underfed Fancying on the featherbed What was never and is not.

Folk wisdom observes that lovers are fools, lovers are blind; we also speak of a folie a deux because in this mutually projective state, the person is acting not out of a conscious relationship to reality, but out of the archaic and often overwhelming power of personal history.

and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.

All our dreams and hopes become as naught, and evil men are allowed to hang their lanterns on our tombstones. What greater folly is there?

IN MY OPINION, one of the great follies in the world is to put yourself inside the head of dysfunctional people. The mistake we usually make is to assume there is a rationale for their behavior. In most cases, there is none.

arguing with others is folly and the knowledge of one generation cannot be passed down to the next. Those may seem cynical sentiments, but there are certain truths you keep inside you and do not defend lest you cheapen and then lose them altogether.