Folly Quotes - page 2

To take my work seriously would be the height of folly. (Edward Gorey)
The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend. View quote
Cicero
Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly. View quote
Alexander Pope
The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull. View quote
Gore Vidal
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce. View quote
Emil Cioran
[...] where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise. View quote
Thomas Gray
There are more fools than wise men, and even in a wise man there is more folly than wisdom. View quote
Nicolas Chamfort
Beauty and folly are old companions. View quote
Benjamin Franklin
Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly. View quote
Democritus
One mans justice is anothers injustice one mans beauty anothers ugliness one mans wisdom anothers folly. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of this voyage, I observe,' says the Admiral, 'that it has miraculously been shown, as may be understood by this writing, by the many signal miracles that He has shown on the voyage, and for me, who for so great a time was in the court of Your Highnesses with the opposition and against the opinion of so many high personages of your household, who were all against me, alleging this undertaking to be folly, which I hope in Our Lord will be to the greater glory of Christianity, which to some slight extent already has happened. (Christopher Columbus)
Where lives the man that has not tried How mirth can into folly glide, And folly into sin. View quote
Walter Scott
True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance. View quote
Akhenaten
The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being. View quote
Atom Egoyan
But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. 'Might makes right,' and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies. View quote
Adin Ballou
It is folly to anticipate evils, and madness to create imaginary ones. View quote
John Adams
Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency. View quote
James Madison
All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse. View quote
John Quincy Adams
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough. View quote
Alain de Botton
America could carry on a two years' war by the confiscation of the property of disaffected persons, and be made happy by their expulsion. Say not that this is revenge, call it rather the soft resentment of a suffering people, who, having no object in view but the good of all, have staked their own all upon a seemingly doubtful event. Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice. View quote
Thomas Paine
In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause. (George Eliot)
Globalization is not in itself a folly: It has enriched the world scientifically and culturally and benefited many people economically as well. View quote
Amartya Sen
The day will come, sooner or later, when people will wonder at the necessity of taking all this trouble to expose the folly of a system, so childish and absurd, and yet so often enforced at the point of a bayonet. View quote
Jean-Baptiste Say
Folly is as great as the sea, it will compass anything. View quote
Bolesław Prus
If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be na inhabited, what a waste of space. View quote
Thomas Carlyle