Folly Quotes - Page 17

• The beginning of wisdom is the knowledge of folly.

  Norm MacDonald

  Wisdom

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• The current perception I get from the evening news is that the world is dominated by human failure, crime, catastrophe, corruption, and tragedy. We are all tuning in to see how the human mind is evolving, but the media keeps hammering home the opposite, that the human mind is mired in darkness and folly.

  Deepak Chopra

  Failure, Home, Media

  "The Greatest Crisis in the World" by Deepak Chopra, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 30, 2005.

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• There are few enough people with sufficient independence to see the weaknesses and follies of their contemporaries and remain themselves untouched by them.

  Albert Einstein

  People, Independence, Individuality

  Albert Einstein (2016). “The Albert Einstein Collection: Essays in Humanism, The Theory of Relativity, and The World As I See It”, p.186, Open Road Media

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• Indeed, I have observed one ingredient, somewhat necessary in a man’s composition towards happiness, which people of feeling would do well to acquire; a certain respect for the follies of mankind: for there are so many fools whom the opinion of the world entitles to regard, whom accident has placed in heights of which they are unworthy, that he who cannot restrain his contempt or indignation at the sight will be too often quarrelling with the disposal of things to relish that share which is allotted to himself. 

  Henry Mackenzie

  Men, Sight, People

  Henry Mackenzie (1837). “The Man of Feeling: The Man of the World ...: The Stories of La Roche, Louisa Venoni, and Nancy Collins: Being the Whole of the Popular Works of the Late Henry Mackenzie, Esq”, p.5

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• Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.

  Tracy Chevalier

  Long, Life Is, Enough

  Tracy Chevalier (1999). “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, E P Dutton

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• I have no temptation to vote, to campaign, to try and stop a candidate who promises new follies.

  Harry Browne

  Temptation, Promise, Trying

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• You can have no wise laws nor free enforcement of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people -- and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive.

  William Allen White

  Wise, Wisdom, Expression

  William Allen White (1937). “Forty Years on Main Street”

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• All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand--his own part comic, part tragic, part cussed, but part glorious nature.

  Robert McNamara

  Animal, Men, Hands

  "McNamara in Context" by Errol Morris, www.nytimes.com. July 8, 2009.

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• But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. 'Might makes right,' and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.

  Adin Ballou

  Crush, Army, Careers

  Adin Ballou (1848). “Christian non-resistance, in all its important bearings, illustrated and defended”, p.87

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• I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations.

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  Believe, Empathy, Apathy

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie Wharncliffe (1837). “The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu”, p.142

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• There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

  Carl Sagan

  Space, Earth Day, Tiny

  Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.29, Ballantine Books

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• When it was reported to General Washington that the army was frequently indulging in swearing, he immediately sent out the following order: The general is sorry to be informed that the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing - a vice little known heretofore in the American army - is growing into fashion. Let the men and officers reflect "that we can not hope for the blessing of heaven on our army if we insult it by our impiety and folly."

  George Washington

  Fashion, Sorry, Army

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• How I envy those clerks who go by to their offices in the morning! There's the day's work cut out for them; no question of mood and feeling; they have just to work at something, and when the evening comes, they have earned their wages, and they are free to rest and enjoy themselves. What an insane thing it is to make literature one's only means of support! When the most trivial accident may at any time prove fatal to one's power of work for weeks or months. No, that is the unpardonable sin! To make a trade of an art! I am rightly served for attempting such a brutal folly.

  George Gissing

  Art, Morning, Mean

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• A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.

  Paul Gauguin

  Men, Young, Old Man

  Paul Gauguin (1978). “The writings of a savage”, Viking Adult

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• The notion that the careless sinner is the smart fellow and the serious-minded Christian, though well-intentioned, is a stupid dolt altogether out of touch with life will not stand up under scrutiny. Sin is basically an act of moral folly, and the greater the folly the greater the fool.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Christian, Smart, Stupid

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• You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about.

  William Tecumseh Sherman

  War, Civilization, Madness

  Said to David F. Boyd at the Louisiana State Seminary on December 24, 1860. "The Civil War: A Book of Quotations" by Robert Blaisdell, 2004.

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• We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense.

  Andrew Coyle Bradley

  Healthy, Suffering, Selfishness

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• The greatest piece of folly is that every man thinks himself compelled to hand down what people think they have known.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Knowledge, Men, Thinking

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2013). “Delphi Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Illustrated)”, p.3589, Delphi Classics

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• Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying Him! That would map out the character of God instead of crying, Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do?

  George MacDonald

  Character, Mind, Maps

  George Macdonald (2012). “Unspoken Sermons Series I, II, and III”, p.270, Simon and Schuster

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• That wisdom which cannot teach me that God is love, shall ever pass for folly.

  John Owen

  God Is Love, Teach

  John Owen (2001). “Communion with God”, p.82, Sovereign Grace Publishers,

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• Those years, months, weeks, days, and hours, that are not filled up with God, with Christ, with grace, and with duty, will certainly be filled up with vanity and folly. The neglect of one day, of one duty, of one hour, would undo us, if we had not an Advocate with the Father.

  Thomas Brooks

  Father, Vanity, Years

  Thomas Brooks (1820). “The privie key of heaven; or Twenty arguments for closet-prayer, in a select discourse”, p.144

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• I go straight in very close to people and I do that because it's the only way you can get the picture. You go right up to them. Even now, I don't find it easy. I don't announce it. I pretend to be focusing elsewhere. If you take someone's photograph it is very difficult not to look at them just after. But it's the one thing that gives the game away. I don't try and hide what I'm doing - that would be folly.

  Martin Parr

  Games, People, Giving

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• None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.

  Morris West

  Nature, World, Kind

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• Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

  George Santayana

  Passion, Thinking, Fancy

  George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.129, Indiana University Press

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• The Iraqis had paid a terrible price for Saddam's folly (in the Gulf War). But looking at the devastation they left behind (in Kuwait), my sympathy was limited.

  Margaret Thatcher

  War, Kuwait, Devastation

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