Foolishness
- April Fools Day is the one day of the year that people critically evaluate news articles before accepting them as true.--Rudro Chakrabarti ("20 Most Profound Things People Thought Of In The Shower")
- But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in the old book, laying up treasures which moths and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.--Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Civil Disobedience)
- A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.--Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
- The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.--Richard Feynman
- Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction... Against folly we have no such defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied; in fact, he can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make him aggressive. A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel.--Dietrich Bonhoffer
- Folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.--Bertrand Russell ("An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" Unpopular Essays)
- The fool is not the man who merely does foolish things. The fool is the man who does not know enough to cash in on his foolishness.--Elbert Hubbard (The Note Book)
- A fool may be known by six things: anger, without cause; speech, without profit; change, without progress; inquiry, without object; putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends.--Arabian Proverb
- The fool shouts loudly, thinking to impress the world.--Marie de France (Medieval Fables of Marie de France)
- The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.--James Russell Lowell
- The foolishness of old age does not characterize all who are old, but only the foolish.--Marcus Tullius Cicero
- Fools are more to be feared than the wicked.--Queen Christina
- Fools have a great advantage over the wise; they are always self-satisfied.--Napoleon (Correspondence)
- The fool's mind wanders, the wise mind wonders.--Patrick J. Mills
- For one word a man is often deemed to be wise, and for one word he is often deemed to be foolish. We should be careful indeed what we say.--Confucius
- I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.--Edith Sitwell
- I wasn't born a fool. It took work to get this way.--Danny Kaye
- If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.--Bertrand Russell
- I'm not denyin' the women are foolish; God Almighty made 'em to match the men.--George Eliot (Adam Bede)
- In my view, it's irreverence, foolish confidence and naivety combined with persistence, open mindedness and a continual ability to learn that created Facebook, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, Apple, Juniper, AOL, Sun Microsystems and others.--Vinod Khosla
- In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that He did not also limit his stupidity.--Konrad Adenauer
- It's better to be thought of as a fool and to surprise people once in a while than to be thought of as a brain and to let people down when they need you the most.--Julie Melanson
- Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans: it's lovely to be silly at the right moment.--Horace
- Neither man nor woman can be worth anything until they have discovered that they are fools. The sooner the discovery is made the better, as there is more time and power for taking advantage of it.--William Lamb Melbourne (in The Young Melbourne by Cecil)
- Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.--Nick Diamos
- None is a fool always, everyone sometimes.--George Herbert (Outlandish Proverbs)
- Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.--Martin Luther King, Jr. (Strength to Love)
- One great mistake made by intelligent people is to refuse to believe that the world is as stupid as it is.--Madame de Tengini
- Only a fool expects to be happy all the time.--Robertson Davies
- Only the wisest and the stupidest of men never change.--Confucius
- People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.--Alice Walker (All the Woman Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave by Hull, Scott & Smith)
- Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.--Douglas Bader
- Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.--Abraham Cowley
- Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.--Elizabeth Gaskell
- Tell him to be a fool every so often / And to have no shame over having been a fool / Yet learning something over every folly.--Carl Sandburg (The People, Yes)
- There are no foolish questions, and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.--Charles Proteus Steinmetz
- There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better."--John Brunner
- There’s no easier way to cure foolishness than to give a man leave to be foolish. And the only way to show a fellow that he’s chosen the wrong business is to let him try it.--George Lorimer (Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son)
- A thick head can do as much damage as a hard heart.--H.W. Dodds
- The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.--Herbert Spencer
- Until you're ready to look foolish, you'll never have the possibility of being great.--Cher
- Useless wisdom is double foolishness.--Icelandic Proverb
- We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.--Martin Luther King, Jr.
- We're fools whether we dance of not, so we might as well dance.--Japanese proverb
- Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.--Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.--Bertrand Russell
- Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.--Charles H. Spurgeon
- Wise men argue causes; fools decide them.--Anacharsis
- The world is full of fools; and he who would not wish to see one, must not only shut himself up alone, but must also break his looking-glass.-- Nicolas Boileau
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This page last updated April 1, 2017.