Folly Quotes - Page 23

• The loyalty, well held to fools, does make Our faith mere folly.

  William Shakespeare

  Loyalty, Doe, Fool

  William Shakespeare, Samuel Weller Singer, Charles Symmons (1850). “The Dramatic Works and Poems of William Shakspeare: With Notes, Original and Selected, and Introductory Remarks to Each Play”, p.294

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• Full oft we see Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly.

  William Shakespeare

  Wisdom, Waiting, Cold

  William Shakespeare (1866). “The Works of William Shakespeare”, p.289

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• Covering discretion with a coat of folly.

  William Shakespeare

  Covering, Coats, Discretion

  William Shakespeare (1816). “The Works of William Shakspeare...: Collated Verbatim with the Most Authentic Copies, and Revised, with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators”, p.401

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• Wisdom is known only by contrasting it with folly; by shadow only we perceive that all visible objects are not flat. Yet Philanthropos would abolish evil!

  Ambrose Bierce

  Evil, Shadow, Flats

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.1221, Delphi Classics

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• Arrogance is ever accompanied by folly.

  Plato

  Arrogance

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• The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  World, Conventional, Customs

  Edgar Allan Poe (2004). “The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe”, p.455, Wordsworth Editions

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• A great nation assailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect: it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets loose.

  Romain Rolland

  War, Hallucinations, Injustice

  Romain Rolland, Charles Kay Ogden (1916). “Above the battle”

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• One day History will pass judgment on each of the nations at war; she will weigh their measure of errors, lies, and heinous follies. Let us try to make ours light before her!

  Romain Rolland

  Lying, War, Errors

  Romain Rolland, Charles Kay Ogden (1916). “Above the battle”

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• The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself - not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

  Edward Abbey

  Animal, Men, Vanity

  "The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West". Book by Edward Abbey ("Shadows from the Big Woods", p. 225), 1977.

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• In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water.

  Brendan Gill

  Water, Gods And Goddesses, Shapes

  1982 Quoted in Laura Rosen Top of the City: NewYork's hidden rooftop world (1990), foreword.

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• Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association.

  Camille Paglia

  Teacher, Association, Firsts

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Vamps & Tramps: New Essays”, p.19, Vintage

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• 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

  Sports, Men, Sea

  James Branch Cabell (2013). “The Essential James Branch Cabell Collection”, p.5, eBookIt.com

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• I fight against the gluttony of time with so many very amusing weapons with gestures and with three attitudes and with charming phrases; with tears and with tinsel, and with sugar-coated pills, and with platitudes slightly regilded. Yes, and I fight him also with little mirrors wherein gleam confusedly the corruptions of lust, and ruddy loyalty, and a bit of moonshine, and the pure diamond of the heart's desire, and the opal cloudings of human compromise: but, above all, I fight that ravening dotard with the strength of my own folly.

  James Branch Cabell

  Loyalty, Attitude, Heart

  James Branch Cabell (1948). “The Witch-woman: A Trilogy about Her”, Amereon Limited

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• Crime, folly, sickness and all phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear aversion or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them.

  Aleister Crowley

  Aversion, Sickness, Failing

  Aleister Crowley (1991). “Magick: In Theory and Practice”, Book Sales

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• He who always prefaces his tale with laughter, is poised between impertinence and folly.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Laughter, Tales, Impertinence

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• Where consequence ceases, there folly, restlessness and misery begin.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Misery, Cease, Consequence

  "Aphorisms on man. Translated from the original manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, citizen of Zuric. ; [One line from Juvenal]" by Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1790.

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• Hence, all you vain delights, As short as are the nights Wherein you spend your folly! There's naught in this life sweet But only melancholy; O sweetest melancholy!

  John Fletcher

  Sweet, Night, Delight

  John Fletcher, “Melancholy”

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• My canvas soothes me into forgetfulness of the scene of turmoil and folly - and worse - of the scene around me. Every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms? "Tempest o'er tempest roll'd" - still the "darkness" is majestic.

  John Constable

  Art, Sunshine, Darkness

  Letter to C.R. Leslie (1834), "John Constable's Correspondence," ed. R.B. Beckett, vol. 3, p. 122, 1962-1970.

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• We cannot bring ourselves to believe it possible that a foreigner should in any respect be wiser than ourselves. If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidence of our wisdom.

  Anthony Trollope

  Believe, Special, Claims

  'Orley Farm' (1862) ch. 18

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• I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically.

  Jane Jacobs

  Granted, I Have Learned, Examining

  Jane Jacobs (2007). “Dark Age Ahead”, p.179, Vintage

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• The idea of defending, as integral parts of our Empire, countries 10,000 miles off, like Australia, which neither pay a shilling to our revenue... nor afford us any exclusive trade... is about as quixotic a specimen of national folly as was ever exhibited.

  Richard Cobden

  Country, Ideas, Australia

  "Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden M.P". Book edited by James E. Thorold Rogers, 1878.

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• Look at your [English] ladies of quality are they not forever parting with their husbands - forfeiting their reputations - and is their life aught but dissipation? In common genteel life, indeed, you may now and then meet with very fine girls - who have politeness, sense and conversation - but these are few - and then look at your trademen's daughters - what are they? poor creatures indeed! all pertness, imitation and folly.

  Fanny Burney

  Girl, Daughter, Husband

  "The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney". Vol. 1, p. 47, journal entry, November 17, 1768.

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• it has been long and justly remarked, that folly has ever sought alliance with beauty.

  Fanny Burney

  Long, Alliances, Has Beens

  Frances Burney, Fanny Burney (2015). “Complete Works of Frances Burney (Delphi Classics)”, p.35, Delphi Classics

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• Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Ambition, Self, Political

  "Erasmus's Praise of Folly: Rivalry and Madness". Neophilologus Journal, 1992.

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• 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

  Wise, Lying, Men

  J. M. Coetzee (1997). “Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship”, p.94, University of Chicago Press

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