Follies Quotes

1. "What would you not have accomplished if you had been free?""Possibly nothing at all; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced — from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination."
Author: Alexandre Dumas

2. "To a good man, yes, one who knows her in all her moods, who can laugh at her follies and rejoice in her virtues; who will not allow her to give in to her worst instincts; one who knows her, and who, knowing her, will still love her, and love her as she should be loved."
Author: Amanda Grange

3. "The wise will hide your follies and help you learn, but the wicked ones will gossip about it with scoundrels."
Author: Aniruddha Sastikar

4. "Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

5. "The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

6. "Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under divers names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty. We find, in all the religions, "a God of armies," a "jealous God," an "avenging God," a "destroying God," a "God," who is pleased with carnage, and whom his worshippers consider it a duty to serve. Lambs, bulls, children, men, and women, are sacrificed to him. Zealous servants of this barbarous God think themselves obliged even to offer up themselves as a sacrifice to him. Madmen may everywhere be seen, who, after meditating upon their terrible God, imagine that to please him they must inflict on themselves, the most exquisite torments. The gloomy ideas formed of the deity, far from consoling them, have every where disquieted their minds, and prejudiced follies destructive to happiness."
Author: Baron D'Holbach

7. "All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievious ones."
Author: Benjamin Franklin

8. "Then she began to quote from Shakespeare:‘But love is blind, and loverscannot seeThe pretty follies that themselvescommit."
Author: Carolyn Keene

9. "The world is a chessboard, Madam, on which we play out our ploys and follies. You are the Queen, of course. Your moves are the strongest. For myself, I claim only to be a knight, advancing in a crooked progress. Do we move ourselves, do you think, or does a great gloved hand place on our squares"
Author: Catherine Fisher

10. "Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled."
Author: Charles MacKay

11. "I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies-thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us."
Author: D.H. Lawrence

12. "I am telling you now that you did right with Robin Stewart and I am telling you that the error you made came later, when you took no heed of his call. It was too late then, I know it. But he should have been in your mind. He was your man. True for you, you had withdrawn the crutch from his sight, but still it should have been there in your hand, ready for him. For you are a leader—don't you know it? I don't, surely, need to tell you?—And that is what leadership means. It means fortifying the fainthearted and giving them the two sides of your tongue while you are at it. It means suffering weak love and schooling it till it matures. It means giving up your privacies, your follies and your leisure. It means you can love nothing and no one too much, or you are no longer a leader, you are the led."
Author: Dorothy Dunnett

13. "[Robin Stewart] was your man. True for you, you had withdrawn the crutch from his sight, but still it should have been there in your hand, ready for him. For you are a leader-don't you know it? I don't, surely, need to tell you?-And that is what leadership means. It means fortifying the fainthearted and giving them the two sides of your tongue while you are at it. It means suffering weak love and schooling it till it matures. It means giving up you privicies, your follies and your leasure. It means you can love nothing and no one too much, or you are no longer a leader, you are led."
Author: Dorothy Dunnett

14. "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."
Author: Edward Gibbon

15. "The Brontë sisters have a renewed hold upon our imagination. They were gifted, well-educated, especially self-educated, and desperate. Their seriousness and poverty separated them forever from the interests and follies of respectable young girls. It was Charlotte's goal to represent the plight of plain, poor, high-minded young women. Sometimes she gave them more rectitude and right thinking than we can easily endure, but she knew their vulnerability, the neglect they expected and received, the spiritual and psychological scars inflicted upon them, the way their frantic efforts were scarcely noticed, much less admired or condoned."
Author: Elizabeth Hardwick

16. "Idyllic follies never last, my little Chauvelin....They come upon us like the measles...and are as easily cured."
Author: Emmuska Orczy

17. "Ah, where in the world have there been greater follies than with the pitiful? And what in the world hath caused more suffering than the follies of the pitiful?Woe unto all loving ones who have not an elevation which is above their pity!Thus spake the devil unto me, once on a time: "Even God hath his hell: it is his love for man." And lately, did I hear him say these words: "God is dead: of his pity for man hath God died."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

18. "I'm really not quite as frippery a fellow as you seem to think! I own that in my grasstime I committed a great many follies and extravagances, but, believe me, I've long since out-grown them! I don't think they were any worse than what nine out of ten youngsters commit, but unfortunately I achieved, through certain circumstances, a notoriety which most young men escape. I was born with a natural aptitude for the sporting pursuits you regard with so much distrust, and I inherited, at far too early an age, a fortune which not only enabled me to indulge my tastes in the most expensive manner imaginable, but which made me an object of such interest that everything I did was noted, and talked of. That's heady stuff for greenhorns, you know! There was a time when I gave the gossips plenty to talk about. But do give me credit for having seen the error of my ways!"
Author: Georgette Heyer

19. "Of all the follies the greatest is to love the world."
Author: Hazrat Muhammad P.B.U.H

20. "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."
Author: Henry MacKenzie

21. "The avoidance of little evils, little sins, little inconsistencies, little weaknesses, little follies, little indiscretions and imprudences, little foibles, little indulgences of self and of the flesh, little acts of indolence or indecision, or slovenliness or cowardice, little equivocations or aberrations from high integrity, little touches of shabbiness or meanness...little indifferences to the feelings or wishes of others, little outbreaks of temper, or crossness, or selfishness, or vanity - the avoidance of such little things as these goes far to make up at least the negative beauty of a holy life."
Author: Horatius Bonar

22. "The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture."
Author: Ian Hamilton Finlay

23. "And aren't the most beautiful follies the ones linked to love?"
Author: Irène Némirovsky

24. "Quite apart from the fact that we usually pay so dearly for our follies, we should be generous about them, to ourselves and others. Yes, we always pay for them, and sometimes the smallest indiscretions cost as much as the largest."
Author: Irène Némirovsky

25. "All right, Schwartz, tackle my mind now. Go as deep as you want. I was born on Baronn in the Sirius Sector. I lived my life in an atmosphere of anti-Terrestrialism in the formative years, so I can't help what flaws and follies lie at the roots of my subconscious. But look on the surface and tell me if, in my adult years, I have not fought bigotry in myself. Not in others; that would be easy. But in myself, and as hard as I could."
Author: Isaac Asimov

26. "For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more--remembering my own sins and follies; and realize that men's hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

27. "I know you do; and it is that which makes the wonder. With your good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others! Affectation of candour is common enough—one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design—to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad—belongs to you alone. And so you like this man's sisters, too, do you? Their manners are not equal to his."
Author: Jane Austen

28. "To be so honestly blind to the follies and"
Author: Jane Austen

29. "I can easily believe it. Women of that class have great opportunities, and if they are intelligent may be well worth listening to. Such varieites of human nature as they are in the habit of witnessing! And it is not merely in its follies, that they are read; for they see it occasionally under every circumstance that can be most interesting or affecting. What instances must pass before them of ardent, disinterested, self-denying attachment, of heroism, fortitude, patience, resignation-- of all the sacrifices that ennoble us most. A sick chamber may often furnish the worth of volumes."
Author: Jane Austen

30. "..he is betrayed by the cynical sparkle of her eyes, by her sophisticated look. Real ladies do not know the price of things, they like adorable follies; their eyes are like beautiful, hothouse flowers."
Author: Jean Paul Sartre

31. "It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one."
Author: Jerome K. Jerome

32. "We should begin to remind people they are always after your money and if you are on something around average earnings you really don't have that spare capacity to pay for all these follies that Labour keep spending their money on."
Author: John Redwood

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

34. "This landscape of abomination is in a state of flux. Gilles now sees that the trunks are covered in frightful tumours and goitres. He observes exostosis and ulcers, pustulent sores the size of rocks, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is a vegetal leper house, an aboreal venereal clinic in which, at a turn in the path, there stands a copper beech.And as he stands beneath those crimson leaves, he feels that he is being drenched in a shower of blood; and imagining that a wood nymph lives under the bark, he becomes enraged; he wants to fumble in the flesh of a goddess, massacre the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men."
Author: Joris Karl Huysmans

35. "Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God...It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin."
Author: Joris Karl Huysmans

36. "The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears."
Author: Joseph Conrad

37. "Every man has his follies - and often they are the most interesting thing he has got."
Author: Josh Billings

38. "Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women."
Author: Lemony Snicket

39. "The greatest wisdom consists in knowing one's own follies."
Author: Madeleine De Souvre Sable

40. "I knew very well that this hope was chimerical. I was like a pauper who mingles fewer tears with his dry bread if he tells himself that at any moment a stranger will bequeath to him his fortune. We must all, in order to make reality more tolerable, keep alive in us a few little follies."
Author: Marcel Proust

41. "We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few follies in ourselves."
Author: Marcel Proust

42. "The error all women commit. Why can't you women love us, faultsand all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet ofclay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love themknowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them allthe more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect,who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands,or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what useis love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. Alllives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon. A man's love is like that.It is wider, larger, more human than a woman's. Women think that theyare making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idolsmerely. You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage tocome down, show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses. I was afraidthat I might lose your love, as I have lost it now."
Author: Oscar Wilde

43. "All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth."
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

44. "Our words always paint two portraits when we describe our families to others. Outsiders cannot but see the small peeves and follies that wrinkle our relationships with our loved ones. The claims we make in defensive certainty--that we were the one wronged, that we were the one who wanted the best--cannot but fall on skeptical ears since everyone makes the same claimsof virtue and innocence. We are always more than we want to be in the eyes of others simply because we are blind to the bulk of what we are. . . . Mimara had wanted him to see her as a victim, as a long-suffering penitent, more captive than daughter, and not as someone embittered and petulant, someone who often held others accountable for her inability to feel safe, to feel anything unpolluted by the perpetual pang of shame . . . And he loved her the more for it."
Author: R. Scott Bakker

45. "With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings."
Author: Robert Walser

46. "History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." --- Edward Gibbon"
Author: Simon Sebag Montefiore

47. "If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor (Works, Vol. iv, p. 325)."
Author: Thomas Jefferson

48. "Perhaps her faults and follies, the unhappiness she had suffered, were not entirely vain if she could follow the path that now she dimly discerned before her, not the path that kind funny old Waddington had spoken of that led nowhither, but the path those dear nuns at the convent followed so humbly, the path that led to peace."
Author: W. Somerset Maugham

49. "Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks."
Author: William Faulkner

50. "What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power."
Author: William S. Paley

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