Foolish Quotes

1. "It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish."
Author: Aeschylus

2. "Ye glow-worms, whose officious flameTo wand'ring mowers shows the way,That in the night have lost their aim,And after foolish fires do stray;Your courteous lights in vain you waste,Since Juliana here is come,For she my mind hath so displac'dThat I shall never find my home."
Author: Andrew Marvell

3. "That isn't trust; that's foolishness! If a man has asked for your trust, it's a sure sign you should not give it. Trust should be earned inherently, without any verbal demands. Trust is knowing a man's character, knowing truth, and relying on that character and truth even when the odds seem against you. That is trust, my dear, not this leap in the dark..." (King Fidel)"
Author: Anne Elisabeth Stengl

4. "My life seems too fast now, so obstructions bother me less than they once did. I am no longer in a hurry to see what is around the next bend. I find myself wanting to backferry, to hover midstream, suspended. If I could do that, I might avoid many things: harsh words, foolish decisions, moments of inattention, regrets that wash over me, like water. (196)"
Author: Anne Fadiman

5. "He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things."
Author: Anton Chekhov

6. "I looked for that which is not, nor can be,And hope deferred made my heart sick, in truth;But years must pass before a hope of youthIs resigned utterly.I watched and waited with a steadfast will:And, tho' the object seemed to fly awayThat I so longed for, ever, day by day,I watched and waited still.Sometimes I said,-'This thing shall be no more;My expectation wearies, and shall cease;I will resign it now, and be at peace.'-Yet never gave it o'er.Sometimes I said,-'It is an empty nameI long for; to a name why should I giveThe peace of all the days I have to live?'-Yet gave it all the same.Alas! thou foolish one,- alike unfitFor healthy joy and salutary pain,Thou knowest the chase useless, and againTurnest to follow it."
Author: Christina Rossetti

7. "With too much pride a man cannot learn a thing. In and of itself, learning teaches you how foolish you are."
Author: Criss Jami

8. "I didn't like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish."
Author: Daniel Day Lewis

9. "We wish we could have been there for you. We didn't have many role models of our own--we latched on to the foolish love of Oscar Wilde and the well-versed longing of Walt Whitman because nobody else was there to show us an untortured path. We were going to be your role models. We were going to give you art and music and confidence and shelter and a much better world. Those who survived lived to do this. But we haven't been there for you. We've been here. Watching as you become the role models."
Author: David Levithan

10. "David Levithan lives in the best of times and the worst of times, the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness, the epoch of belief and the epoch of incredulity, the season of Light, and the season of Darkness. He has endeavored in this Ghostly little book to raise the Ghost of an Idea which shall not put his readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with him. Whether he shall turn out to the be hero of his own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, time must show."
Author: David Levithan

11. "For with slight efforts how should we obtain great results? It is foolish even to desire it."
Author: Euripides

12. "I had fallen out of my secure world, precipitated beyond the territories I had only begun to control so skillfully. What a foolish step to take. What an insane move to make."
Author: Francesca Marciano

13. "Woman is always fickle - foolish is he who trusts her."
Author: Francis I

14. "Why is it that foolishness repeats itself with such monotonous precision?"
Author: Frank Herbert

15. "But you invite ...""I invite a bit of military nonsense.""That's what I ...""Duncan, I am a teacher. Remember that. By repetition, I impress the lesson.""What lesson?" "The ultimately suicidal nature of military foolishness."
Author: Frank Herbert

16. "First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity."
Author: George Bernard Shaw

17. "Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real."
Author: Grant Morrison

18. "To contrast national solidarity and international cooperation as two opposites seems foolish to me."
Author: Gustav Stresemann

19. "Because it is useless, and I tell them so at once. If you had confessed your fears to me sooner, I would have reassured you. My dear friend, a man in love is not only foolish but dangerous. I cease all intercourse with people who love me or pretend to; firstly, because they bore me, and secondly, because I look upon them with dread, as I would upon a mad dog. I know that your love is only a kind of appetite; while with me it would be a communion of souls. Now, look me in the face—" she no longer smiled. "I will never be your sweetheart; it is therefore useless for you to persist in your efforts. And now that I have explained, shall we be friends?"
Author: Guy De Maupassant

20. "For the Bible, despite all its contradictions and absurdities, its barbarisms and obscenities, remains grand and gaudy stuff, and so it deserves careful study and enlightened exposition. It is not only lovely in phrase; it is also rich in ideas, many of them far from foolish. One somehow gathers the notion that it was written from end to end by honest men—inspired, perhaps, but nevertheless honest. When they had anything to say they said it plainly, whether it was counsel that enemies be slain or counsel that enemies be kissed. They knew how to tell a story, and how to sing a song, and how to swathe a dubious argument in specious and disarming words."
Author: H.L. Mencken

21. "I might be a beast astray, with no sense of its environment, yet there was some meaning in my foolish life, something in me gave an answer and was the receiver of those distant calls from worlds far above."
Author: Hermann Hesse

22. "Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men."
Author: Ian Fleming

23. "Man, my friends,is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble. We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!"
Author: Isak Dinesen

24. "Leah looked at her parents, lost in their own fantasies, and decided that the three of them were a pretty pathetic family - but she wasn't sure who was more pathetic: the dateless girl spending the night of the big dance by herself in her bedroom, or the parents who foolishly believed a boy would arrive on their doorstep with flowers, a limo, and a promise to rescue their daughter from her solitude."
Author: J.M. Reep

25. "And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood."
Author: James Joyce

26. "Susan hardly had begun to slow down when Tera appeared from between a couple of buildings and loped over to the car. I leaned forward, opened the door, and she got into the backseat. I threw her the extra clothes I had picked up, and she began to dress without comment.It worked," I said. "We did it."Of course it worked," Tera said. "Men are foolish. They will stare at anything female and naked."
Author: Jim Butcher

27. "I think we were very foolish, you and I."
Author: John Speed

28. "Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again--not half, by a long way."
Author: Joseph Conrad

29. "Then, with a cheeky quirk of his brows, he leaned forward and murmured, "Would it be improper of me to admit that I am inordinately flattered by your attention tothe details of my face?"Anne snorted out a laugh. "Improper and ludicrous.""It is true that I have never felt quite so colorful," he said, with a clearly feigned sigh."You are a veritable rainbow," she agreed. "I see red and . . . well, no orange and yellow, but certainly green and blue and violet.""You forgot indigo.""I did not," she said, with her very best governess voice. "I have always found it to be a foolish addition to the spectrum. Have you ever actually seen a rainbow?""Once or twice," he replied, looking rather amused by her rant."
Author: Julia Quinn

30. "Love, I thought to myself abstractedly. Not 'This is love' or 'Is this love?' Not a sentence, not a certainty, not a thought with moving parts or direction. Just love, all of it, as it is. Whether it's enough or not. Wthether it's real or we're making it up. However shoddy it gets, or bent out of shape. It's still extraordinary. However foolish, however vain. However badly it ends. Love."
Author: Julian Gough

31. "That's lovely singing, Saraid," Eile said. "Is Sorry asleep now?" Saraid shook her head solemnly. "Sorry's sad. Crying." She held the doll against her shoulder, patting its back. "Oh. Why is she sad?" "Sorry wants Feeler come back." It was like a punch in the gut. She had thought Saraid had forgotten him; she had assumed new friends and a safe haven would drive the memories of that long journey across country, just the three of them, from her daughter's mind. Foolish. The images of that time were still bright and fresh in her own head; she dreamed of them every night. Why should Saraid be any different just because she was small?"
Author: Juliet Marillier

32. "Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle."
Author: Lord Melbourne

33. "A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior."
Author: Lucy Larcom

34. "I am aware always that the powers that be are so strong, we can not go headlong to pit our forces, it would be suicidal, so we had that position. Which Lenin himself said that 'it is not only foolish to launch an armed revolution but it is a leftist criminal adventurism when the people are not ready to support it.' The people are not ready, they don't even understand what we are talking about.. . . Yes, even socialism is not yet understood by people, much less communism. And the rich are very afraid of communism because it means confiscation of their wealth and liquidation of their lives."
Author: Luis Taruc

35. "The most foolish description of the young is that they are rebellious. The truth is that they are a fellowship of cowards."
Author: Manu Joseph

36. "All wars are sacred,to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and the fine words from stay-at-home orators. Sometimes the rallying cry is 'save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!' Sometimes it's 'down with Popery!' and sometimes ‘Liberty!' and sometimes ‘Cotton, Slavery and States' Rights!"
Author: Margaret Mitchell

37. "You are my king. You could command me to stop seeing her."Niall turned his gaze to Irial. "What would you do?""Blind myself, if you were foolish enough to use those words."
Author: Melissa Marr

38. "Foolish potato, talking to her like that won't work. You've got to be mean and show off your foil-wrapped rigidity."
Author: Michael Diack

39. "I know it sounds foolishly old fashioned, but I'm stuck with this idea that there's something dignified and noble about facing your enemy and looking him in the eye before you thrust a saber in his heart."
Author: Michael Robotham

40. "I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans)."
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

41. "The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi."
Author: O. Henry

42. "Paul: 'After recording sessions, at two or three in the morning, we'd be careering through the villages on the way to Weybridge, shouting 'weyhey' and driving much too fast. George would perhaps be in his Ferrari - he was quite a fast driver - and John and I would be following in his big Rolls Royce or the Princess. John had a mike in the Rolls with a loudspeaker outside and he'd be shouting to George in the front: 'It is foolish to resist, it is foolish to resist! Pull over!' It was insane. All the lights would go on in the houses as we went past - it must have freaked everybody out.When John went to make 'How I Won the War' in Spain, he took the same car, which he virtually lived in. It had blacked-out windows and you could never see who was in it, so it was perfect. John didn't come out of it - he just used to talk to the people outside through the microphone: 'Get away from the car! Get away!"
Author: Paul McCartney

43. "I'm psyched-up when I do radio. I can reach hundreds of thousands of people in a market. And way psyched-up when I'm on television. For people not to take it seriously is foolish."
Author: Richard Lewis

44. "Foolish is the mind of a man to make bogeys for itself and to live in terrors of fear for things which lack of the substance of truth."
Author: Richard Llewellyn

45. "Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness, loss. I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders. So profoundly responsive a chord had the tale struck in me that the threats of my mother and grandmother had no effect whatsoever. They read my insistence as mere obstinacy, as foolishness, something that would quickly pass; and they had no notion how desperately serious the tale had made me. They could not have known that Ella's whispered story of deception and murder had been the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total emotional response. No words or punishment could have possibly made me doubt. I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway."
Author: Richard Wright

46. "Stay hungry, stay foolish."
Author: Steve Jobs

47. "I've performed solo for 20 years now, but I don't do much of it, because if you only play alone, you go crazy and out of tune and play foolish music."
Author: Steve Lacy

48. "Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage."
Author: Sydney J. Harris

49. "Seldom do people think things through foolishly. More often, they do not bother to think things through at all, so that even brainy individuals can reach untenable conclusions because their brainpower means little if it is not deployed and applied."
Author: Thomas Sowell

50. "If God loves the world, might that not be proved in my own love for it? I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die. I knew the old wrong and the death that lay in the world. Just as a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures, not for Himself or for the world or for one another. To allow that love to exist fully and freely, He must allow it not to exist at all. His love is suffering. It is our freedom and His sorrow. To love the world as much even as I could love it would be suffering also, for I would fail. And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart."
Author: Wendell Berry

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