Quotes about fools and folly

For fools rush in where angels fear to tread

Fools make feasts, and wise men eat them.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness

If you would improve, be content to be thought foolish and dull with regard to externals.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

We’re all mad here.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

But love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

There are foolish people who know and who skilfully use their folly.

Who lives without folly is not so wise as he thinks.

In growing old we become more foolish—and more wise.

It is great folly to wish only to be wise.

There are follies as catching as infections.

A fool has not stuff in him to be good.

The vivacity which increases in old age is not far removed from folly.

Old fools are more foolish than young fools.

No fools so wearisome as those who have some wit.

Sometimes we meet a fool with wit, never one with discretion.

One does not believe in the follies of clever men: what a forfeiture of the rights of man!

If a clever man commits a folly, it is not a small one.

Absurdities presented with good taste rouse disgust and admiration.

It is a terrible thing for an eminent man to be gloried in by fools.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

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

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Folly is the cloak of knavery.

The selfish smiling fool and the sullen frowning fool shall be both thought wise that they may be a rod.

Listen to the fool’s reproach; it is a kingly title.

If others had not been foolish we should have been so.

ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.

April FOOL, n. The March fool with another month added to his folly.

BEARD, n. The hair that is commonly cut off by those who justly execrate the absurd Chinese custom of shaving the head.

BONDSMAN, n. A fool who, having property of his own, undertakes to become responsible for that entrusted to another to a third.

CHILDHOOD, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth—two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

Court FOOL, n. The plaintiff.

DESTINY, n. A tyrant’s authority for crime and fool’s excuse for failure.

DIVINATION, n. The art of nosing out the occult. Divination is of as many kinds as there are fruit-bearing varieties of the flowering dunce and the early fool.

ECCENTRICITY, n. A method of distinction so cheap that fools employ it to accentuate their incapacity.

EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

ELOQUENCE, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

ELYSIUM, n. An imaginary delightful country which the ancients foolishly believed to be inhabited by the spirits of the good. This ridiculous and mischievous fable was swept off the face of the earth by the early Christians—may their souls be happy in Heaven!

EXPERIENCE, n. The wisdom that enables us to recognize as an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

EXPOSTULATION, n. One of the many methods by which fools prefer to lose their friends.

FOLLY, n. That “gift and faculty divine” whose creative and controlling energy inspires Man’s mind, guides his actions and adorns his life.

HEATHEN, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel. According to Professor Howison, of the California State University, Hebrews are heathens.

HERMIT, n. A person whose vices and follies are not sociable.

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

INTIMACY, n. A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

MAUSOLEUM, n. The final and funniest folly of the rich.

PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.

PLATONIC, adj. Pertaining to the philosophy of Socrates. Platonic Love is a fool’s name for the affection between a disability and a frost.

QUIXOTIC, adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman’s name is pronounced Ke-ho-tay.

RASCAL, n. A fool considered under another aspect.

RASCALITY, n. Stupidity militant. The activity of a clouded intellect.

RADIUM, n. A mineral that gives off heat and stimulates the organ that a scientist is a fool with.

REALITY, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.

RHADOMANCER, n. One who uses a divining-rod in prospecting for precious metals in the pocket of a fool.

RUM, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.

VANITY, n. The tribute of a fool to the worth of the nearest ass.

VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Passion often renders the most clever man a fool, and even sometimes renders the most foolish man clever.

Few people know death, we only endure it, usually from determination, and even from stupidity and custom; and most men only die because they know not how to prevent dying.

There are no accidents so unfortunate from which skilful men will not draw some advantage, nor so fortunate that foolish men will not turn them to their hurt.

To awaken a man who is deceived as to his own merit is to do him as bad a turn as that done to the Athenian madman who was happy in believing that all the ships touching at the port belonged to him.

It is sometimes necessary to play the fool to avoid being deceived by cunning men.

The only good examples are those, that make us see the absurdity of bad originals.

If it was not for the company of fools, a witty man would often be greatly at a loss.

There are persons whose only merit consists in saying and doing stupid things at the right time, and who ruin all if they change their manners.

Numberless arts appear foolish whose secret motives are most wise and weighty.

Folly follows us at all stages of life. If one appears wise ‘tis but because his folly is proportioned to his age and fortune.

There are people who are like farces, which are praised but for a time (however foolish and distasteful they may be).

Lucky people are bad hands at correcting their faults; they always believe that they are right when fortune backs up their vice or folly.

There are persons fated to be fools, who commit follies not only by choice, but who are forced by fortune to do so.

Sometimes there are accidents in our life the skilful extrication from which demands a little folly.

If there be men whose folly has never appeared, it is because it has never been closely looked for.

We may find means to cure a fool of his folly, but there are none to set straight a cross-grained spirit.

It may well be that those who have trapped us by their tricks do not seem to us so foolish as we seem to ourselves when trapped by the tricks of others.

The most dangerous folly of old persons who have been loveable is to forget that they are no longer so.

Pride as the other passions has its follies. We are ashamed to own we are jealous, and yet we plume ourselves in having been and being able to be so.

Discovering reciprocal love should really disenchant the lover with regard to the beloved. “What! She is modest enough to love even you? Or stupid enough? Or—or—-“

A sign of strong character, when once the resolution has been taken, to shut the ear even to the best counter-arguments. Occasionally, therefore, a will to stupidity.

There is no piece of foolishness but it can be corrected by intelligence or accident; no piece of wisdom but it can miscarry by lack of intelligence or by accident.

If a man is to achieve all that is asked of him, he must take himself for more than he is, and as long as he does not carry it to an absurd length, we willingly put up with it.

The really foolish thing in men who are otherwise intelligent is that they fail to understand what another person says, when he does not exactly hit upon the right way of saying it.

The most foolish of all errors is for clever young men to believe that they forfeit their originality in recognising a truth which has already been recognised by others.

Fools and wise folk are alike harmless. It is the half-wise, and the half-foolish, who are the most dangerous.

It would not be worth while to see seventy years if all the wisdom of this world were foolishness with God.

When a great idea enters the world as a Gospel, it becomes an offence to the multitude, which stagnates in pedantry; and to those who have much learning but little depth, it is folly.

Art is a medium of what no tongue can utter; and thus it seems a piece of folly to try to convey its meaning afresh by means of words. But, by trying to do so, the understanding gains; and this, again, benefits the faculty in practice.

It is always right to detect a fraud, and to perceive a folly; but it is often very wrong to expose either. A man of business should always have his eyes open; but must often seem to have them shut.

It is hard to say which is the greatest fool; he who tells the whole truth, or he who tells no truth at all. Character is as necessary in business as in trade. No man can deceive often in either.

A cheerful, easy countenance and behavior are very useful at court; they make fools think you are a good-natured man; and they make designing men think you are an undesigning one.

Behold, the fool saith, “Put not all thine eggs in the one basket”—which is but a manner of saying, “Scatter your money and your attention;” but the wise man saith, “Put all your eggs in the one basket and—watch that basket”

July 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.