Quotes on Folly

It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire when you live next door.

To seek after any shape of God, and to assign a form and image to Him, is a proof of man's folly. For God, whosoever he be (if haply there be any other but the world itself), and in what part soever resident, all sense He is, all sight, all hearing: He is the whole of the life and of the soul, all of Himself.

We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it.

The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.

The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

Where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.

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.

The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.

Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.

Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep.

The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand, such a course might just as well be called the greatest folly: for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.

It would be folly to argue that the people cannot make political mistakes. They can and do make grave mistakes. They know it, they pay the penalty, but compared with the mistakes which have been made by every kind of autocracy they are unimportant.

Government price-fixing once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared.

Some accidents there are in life that a little folly is necessary to help us out of.

You sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanliness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly.

The fool sees naught but folly; and the madman only madness. Yesterday I asked a foolish man to count the fools among us. He laughed and said, "This is too hard a thing to do, and it will take too long. Were it not better to count only the wise?"

One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom anpther's folly.

Every man's occupation should be beneficial to his fellow-man as well as profitable to himself. All else is vanity and folly.

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.