1.
Where there is emulation, there will be vanity; where there is vanity, there will be folly.
Samuel Johnson
2.
There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.
Daniel Dennett
3.
When knowledge is limited - it leads to folly... When knowledge exceeds a certain limit, it leads to exploitation.
Abu Bakr
4.
Meddling with another man's folly is always thankless work.
Rudyard Kipling
5.
PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.
Ambrose Bierce
7.
America is a fortunate country.
She grows by the follies of our European nations.
Napoleon Bonaparte
8.
The enemy is within the gates;
it is with our own luxury,
our own folly,
our own criminality that we have to contend.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
9.
A thing can be true and still be desperate folly.
Richard Adams
12.
It was not one folly that Shakespeare talked about. If Love truly is but a myriad of follies then I have committed them all, that can mean only one thing - I loved her truly, madly, deeply!
Faraaz Kazi
13.
Silence is not always a sign of wisdom, but babbling is ever a mark of folly.
Benjamin Franklin
15.
We are more heavily taxed by our idleness, pride and folly than we are taxed by government.
Benjamin Franklin
16.
Arrogance is ever accompanied by folly.
Plato
17.
Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all … is not to have one.
Nikos Kazantzakis
20.
Those who realise their folly are not true fools.
Zhuangzi
22.
Despair is deadly sin, but worse, it is mortal folly.
Ellis Peters
23.
The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.
Edgar Allan Poe
26.
It is a great folly to be willing to violate the friendship of God, rather than the law of human friendship.
Teresa of Avila
27.
Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.
Ambrose Bierce
28.
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
29.
That wisdom which cannot teach me that God is love, shall ever pass for folly.
John Owen
30.
Folly often goes beyond her bounds, but impudence knows none.
Ben Jonson
31.
Experience increases our wisdom but doesn't reduce our follies.
Josh Billings
32.
To take my work seriously would be the height of folly.
Edward Gorey
34.
Wisdom at times is found in folly.
Horace
36.
A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.
Antonin Scalia
38.
Folly is as great as the sea, it will compass anything.
Bolesław Prus
40.
Alas! we see that the small have always suffered for the follies of the great.
[Fr., Helas! on voit que de tout temps
Les Petits ont pati des sottises des grands.]
Jean de La Fontaine
42.
And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis.
Edgar Pangborn
45.
He who always prefaces his tale with laughter, is poised between impertinence and folly.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
47.
Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.
George Bernard Shaw
48.
Opponents of globalisation may see it as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly.
Amartya Sen
49.
It is folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.
Richard Whately
50.
Such is the supreme folly of man that he labours so as to labour no more.
Leonardo da Vinci