Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere. — William Shakespeare
The fool has one great advantage over a man of sense; he is always satisfied with himself. — Napoleon Bonaparte
Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit. — Elbert Hubbard
The fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. Measure For Measure — William Shakespeare
He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom. — James Huneker
Better foolish by all than wise by yourself. — German proverbs
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. — Akhenaton
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. — William Shakespeare
There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man. — Aristotle
The foolish sayings of a rich man pass for wise ones. — Proverbs
April fool, n. The March fool with another month added to his folly. — Ambrose Bierce
The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly. — Jim Rohn
Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. — Leo Tolstoy
Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep. — Alexander Hamilton
Do not correct a fool or he will hate you. Correct a wise man and he will appreciate you.
To overcome the intelligent by folly is contrary to the natural order of things; to overcome the foolish by intelligence is in accord with the natural order. To overcome the intelligent by intelligence, however, is a matter of opportunity. — Zhuge Liang
And so, being young and dipt in folly, I fell in love with melancholy. — Edgar Allan Poe
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority. — Arthur Schopenhauer
Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.
The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights'. It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. — Queen Victoria
Keep alive within you and bring under wise control that courage which makes you long to undertake great works, which others might consider it folly to attempt. — Mary Euphrasia Pelletier
We cannot rely on ourselves, for we have learned by bitter experience the folly of self-confidence. We are compelled to look to the Lord alone. Blessed is the wind that drives the ship into the harbor. Blessed is the distress that forces us to rest in our God. — Charles Spurgeon
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. — George Bernard Shaw
Human Folly Quotes
What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature. — Voltaire
My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. — Yann Martel
There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. — Carl Sagan
The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute. The man who does not ask, is a fool for life.
These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Crusades - the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation. — David Hume
The utter folly of our time is lamentable, that men should think to assist God with human help and to protect the Church of Christ by worldly ambition. — Hilary of Poitiers
Circumstances do not make a man, they reveal him.
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive. It knows the names of the king's bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. — Jean-Henri Fabre
Clever people are never credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights! — Friedrich Nietzsche
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition. — Isaac Asimov
Is there in all the history of human folly a greater fool than a clergymen in politics? — Pat Robertson
Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny. — Marguerite Duras
Meddling with another man's folly is always thankless work. — Rudyard Kipling
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. — Mark Twain
To speak less of oneself than what one really is, is folly, not modesty; and to take that for current pay which is under a man's value, is pusillanimity and cowardice. — Michel de Montaigne
One man's folly is another man's wife. — Helen Rowland
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom anpther's folly. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed. — Leo Rosten
For take thy ballaunce if thou be so wise, And weigh the winds that under heaven doth blow; Or weigh the light that in the east doth rise; Or weigh the thought that from man's mind doth flow. — Edmund Spenser
Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies, And catch the manners living as they rise; Laugh where we must, be candid where we can, But vindicate the ways of God to man. — Alexander Pope
FOLLY, n. That "gift and faculty divine" whose creative and controlling energy inspires Man's mind, guides his actions and adorns his life. — Ambrose Bierce
One man's folly is often another man's wife. — Helen Rowland
I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man's unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them! — Mary Wortley Montagu
Man's wisdom is his best friend; folly his worst enemy. — William Temple
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. — Aldous Huxley
But for the wise, it says in the Bible: when a wise man hears wisdom, he reacts. When a fool hears it, his acts are folly. If you wanna be a fool, help yourself, it's not my problem. — RZA
Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly. — Katharine Fullerton Gerould
If kissing is man's greatest invention, then fermentation and patriarchy compete with the domestication of animals for the distinction of being man's worst folly, and no doubt the three combined long ago, the one growing out of the others, to foster civilization and lead Western humanity to its present state of decline. — Tom Robbins
Every man's vanity ought to be his greatest shame; and every man's folly ought to be his greatest secret. — Francis Quarles
Every man's follies are the caricature resemblances of his wisdom. — John Sterling
It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from 'the wise man's mouth' but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth. — J. M. Coetzee
In the beginning the Gods made man, and fashioned the sky and the sea, And the earth's fair face for man's dwelling-place, and this was the Gods' decree: "Lo, We have given to man five wits: he discerneth folly and sin; He is swift to deride all the world outside, and blind to the world within: So that man may make sport and amuse Us, in battling for phrases or pelf, Now that each may know what forebodeth woe to his neighbor, and not to himself. — James Branch Cabell
It's folly that women measure their happiness with the pleasures of the bed, but they do. And when the pleasure cools or their man goes missing, all they once lived for turns dark and hateful. — Euripides
Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day. — Nathaniel Hawthorne
Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority. — Robert Anton Wilson
Every man's occupation should be beneficial to his fellow-man as well as profitable to himself. All else is vanity and folly. — P. T. Barnum
The why is plain as way to parish church:
He that a fool doth very wisely hit
Doth very foolishly, although he smart,
Not to seem senseless of the bob; if not,
The wise man's folly is anatomiz'd
Even by the squand'ring glances of the fool. — William Shakespeare
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life-hence it is a valuable possession to him. — Mark Twain
Those fine eyes of hers had a disconcertingly direct gaze, and very often twinkled in a manner disturbing to male egotism. She had common-sense too, and what man wanted the plainly matter-of-fact, when he could enjoy instead Sophia's delicious folly? — Georgette Heyer
This fellow is wise enough to play the fool; And to do that well craves a kind of wit: He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time, And, like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. This is a practise As full of labour as a wise man's art For folly that he wisely shows is fit; But wise men, folly-fall'n, quite taint their wit. — William Shakespeare
In Conclusion
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