Folly Quotes

“Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters

“The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays

“Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed.”
― Siddharta Gautama

“The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them."

(The Decider, July 21, 2007)”
― Bill Maher

“It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.”
― Epicurus

“Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“A thing can be true and still be desperate folly, Hazel.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. [He is also a fool.]”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”
― Herbert Spencer

“...for it is the small temptations which undermine integrity unless we watch and pray and never think them too trivial to be resisted.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“He who imagines he can do without the world deceives himself much; but he who fancies the world cannot do without him is still more mistaken.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

“The highest form of bliss is living with a certain degree of folly.”
― Erasmus

“It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.”
― Anton Chekhov, Letters of Anton Chekhov

“There are two goddesses in your heard. The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, giver her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.”
― Joe Vigil

“In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“I will tear this folly from my heart, though every fibre bleed as I rend it away!”
― Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

“No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her 'Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir.”
― Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

“He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Idler; Poems

“That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about.' And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it--have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“I have a cunning plan.”
― Richard Curtis, Blackadder the Third (The Award-Winning BBC Comedy)

“Is it folly to believe in something that is intangible? After all, some of the greatest intangibles are Love, Hope, and Wonder.

Another is Deity.

The choice to be a fool is yours.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“...swept into the giddy vortex which keeps so many young people revolving aimlessly, till they go down or are cast upon the shore, wrecks of what they might have been”
― Louisa May Alcott

“All the worse for the undeniable talent which hides the evil so subtly and makes the danger so delightful.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“I had to follow the ineradicable foolishness which furnishes the steps to true wisdom.”
― C.G. Jung