Folly Quotes - Page 18

• Doubt is my boon companion, the faithful St. Bernard ever at my side. Whether writing essays or just going about daily life, I am constantly second-guessing myself. My mind is filled with 'yes, buts,' 'so whats?' and other skeptical rejoinders. I am forever monitoring myself for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity and, guess what, I keep finding examples. Age has not made me wiser, except maybe in retrospect.

  Phillip Lopate

  Humility, Writing, Forever

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• The Crusades - the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.

  David Hume

  Age, Signals, Crusades

  David Hume (2016). “The History of England, vol. 1~6, Completed: Revision of Great Book”, p.234, VM eBooks

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• So long as thou are ignorant be not ashamed to learn. Ignorance is the greatest of all infirmities, and when justified, the chiefest of all follies.

  Izaak Walton

  Ignorance, Long, Ignorant

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• I want nothing new, if I can have but a tithe of the old secured to me. I will spurn all wealth beside. Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here!

  Henry David Thoreau

  Travel, Home, Thinking

  Henry David Thoreau (1963). “Thoreau: people, principles, and politics”

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• It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.

  Arundhati Roy

  Believe, Nuclear, Weapons

  Arundhati Roy (2016). “The End of Imagination”, p.49, Haymarket Books

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• Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today's wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the cemeteries of France and Belgium - and tens of millions of Americans will feel a similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with others' lives.

  Adam Hochschild

  War, Lying, Loss

  "Where Have All the Graveyards Gone? The War That Didn’t End War and Its Unending Successors" by Adam Hochschild, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 3, 2011.

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• The ultimate folly is to think that something crucial to your welfare is being taken care of for you.

  Robert Breault

  Taken, Responsibility, Thinking

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• A world war - God forbid! - will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to untimely death. Yet there are those who sincerely feel that disarmament is an evil and international negotiation is an abominable waste of time.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  War, Race, Evil

  Martin Luther King Jr. (1963). “Strength to Love”

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• We are all citizens of one world, we are all of one blood. To hate people because they were born in another country, because they speak a different language, or because they take a different view on this subject or that, is a great folly. Desist, I implore you, for we are all equally human. . . . Let us have but one end in view: the welfare of humanity.

  John Amos Comenius

  Country, Hate, Views

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• The planet earth has a life span of eight billion years, give or take a few million. People have been around for approximately forty thousand years-a virtual blink in the cosmos. It is sad that we as a species are ravaging the natural world so fast that we are jeopardizing our survival. If we wipe ourselves out, it would be the height of folly, but the earth will survive even us. It will eventually restore itself. It might take a few thousand years, and it won't be just as it was before, but its life is stronger than death.

  Charlotte Sophia Kasl

  Eight, Years, People

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• Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

  Henry Adams

  Indulge In, Laughing, Society

  Benjamin Franklin, Ulysses S Grant, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Adams (2016). “Great American Lives: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, and The Education of Henry Adams”, p.1505, Open Road Media

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• Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
  Against stupidity the very gods
  Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
  Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
  Wise foundress of the system of the world,
  Guide of the stars, who are thou then, if thou,
  Bound to the tail of folly's uncurb'd steed,
  Must, vainly shrieking, with the drunken crowd,
  Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Death, Wise, Daughter

  Friedrich Schiller (1861). “Schiller's Complete Works”, p.435

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• Whatever folly men commit, be their shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us exercise forbearance; remember that when these faults appear in others it is our follies and vices that we behold.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Exercise, Men, Vices

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2012). “Collected Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer”, p.224, Simon and Schuster

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• If to talk to oneself when alone is folly, it must be doubly unwise to listen to oneself in the presence of others.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Conversation, Oneself, Ifs

  Baltasar Gracian, Baltasar Gracián y Morales (2004). “The Art of Worldly Wisdom”, p.80, Shambhala Publications

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• The wise are always impatient, for he that increases knowledge increases impatience of folly.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Wise, Wisdom, Impatient

  Baltasar Gracian (2006). “The Art of Worldly Wisdom”, p.65, Shambhala Publications

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• ... We brush aside all scales not our own, as if they were follies or delusions.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Judgment, Scales, Brushes

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

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Truth, Thinking, Firsts

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• There is as much trickery required to grow rich by a stupid book as there is folly in buying it.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Stupid, Book, Reading

  "The "Characters" of Jean de la Bruyère". Book by Jean de La Bruyère. Translated by Henri Van Laun, 1885.

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• He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.

  Charles Lamb

  Perfection, Mixtures, Matter

  Charles Lamb (1835). “Essays of Elia”, p.48

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• Ah! but the moods lie in his nature, my boy, just as much as his reflections did, and more. A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.

  George Eliot

  Wise, Lying, Reflection

  George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.126, Wordsworth Editions

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• It is folly to censure him whom all the world adores.

  Publilius Syrus

  Criticism, World, Adore

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• The young fancy that their follies are mistaken by the old for happiness. The old fancy that their gravity is mistaken by the young for wisdom.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Fancy, Gravity, Young

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.355

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• Man is, perhaps, no more prone to war than he used to be and no more inclined to commit other evil deeds. But a given amount of ill will or folly will go further than it used to.

  Joseph Wood Krutch

  War, Men, Ill Will

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• Men often treat others worse than they treat themselves, but they rarely treat anyone better. It is the height of folly to expect consideration and decency from a person who mistreats himself.

  Thomas Szasz

  Kindness, Men, People

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• All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.

  George Orwell

  Law, Profound, Wickedness

  George Orwell, Peter Hobley Davison, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “It is what I think: 1947-1948”

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