Foolishness Quotes

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”
― Colette

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
― Confucius

“Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.”
― Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted By Ali Baba And The Bunch On Rainy Days

“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.”
― Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle

“Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Any fool can make a rule
And any fool will mind it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Journal #14

“In wars, boy, fools kill other fools for foolish causes”
― Robert Jordan, To the Blight

“There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”
― George W. Bush

“But if you're gonna dine with them cannibals
Sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten . . .”
― Nick Cave

“How foolish to believe we are more powerful than the sea or the sky.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea

“Until you're ready to look foolish, you'll never have the possibility of being great.”
― Cher

“A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.”
― Moliere

“I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“If you fear nothing, then you are not brave. You are merely too foolish to be afraid.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, Skin Trade

“If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”
― Bertrand Russell

“She was reflecting back on a truth she had learned over the years: that people heard what they wanted to hear, saw what they wanted, believed what they wanted.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Bodies Left Behind

“One of the greatest evils is the foolishness of a good man. For the giving man to withhold helping someone in order to first assure personal fortification is not selfish, but to elude needless self-destruction; martyrdom is only practical when the thought is to die, else a good man faces the consequence of digging a hole from which he cannot escape, and truly helps no one in the long run.”
― Mike Norton, Just Another War Story

“People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools. ”
― Alice Walker

“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.”
― Robert Burns, The complete poetical works of Robert Burns

“Compromise is a stalling between two fools.”
― Stephen Fry

“Foolishness is more than being stupid, that deadly combination of arrogance and ignorance.”
― Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change

“Wise men are not pacifists; they are merely less likely to jump up and retaliate against their antagonizers. They know that needless antagonizers are virtually already insecure enough.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“We don't have education, we have inspiration; if I was educated I would be a damn fool.”
― Bob Marley, Bob Marley - Legend

“Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“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

“Passion often makes fools of the wisest men and gives the silliest wisdom.”
― Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections or Sentences and Moral Maxims