Quotes about Folly
The point, Squire, is that where they used to be confined to State institutions or to the mudrooms and attics of remote country houses they are now abroad everywhere. The government pays them to travel. To procreate, for that matter. I've seen entire families here that can best be explained as hallucinations. Hordes of drooling dolts lurching through the streets. Their inane gibbering. And of course no folly so deranged or pernicious as to escape their advocacy.
- Cormac McCarthy
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.
- DH Lawrence
Romanists argue that such is the obscurity of the Scriptures, that not only the people, but the Church itself needs the aid of tradition in order to their being properly understood. But if the Bible, a comparatively plain book, in one probable volume, needs to be thus explained, what is to explain the hundreds of folios in which these traditions are recorded? Surely a guide to the interpretation of the latter must be far more needed than for the Scriptures.
- Charles Hodge
"Because of your wrath there is no health in my body; my bones have no soundness because of my sin. My guilt has overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear. My wounds fester and are loathsome because of my sinful folly… My back is filled with searing pain; there is no health in my body. I am feeble and utterly crushed; I groan in anguish of heart."
- Psalm 38:3-8
Man's wisdom is his best friend; folly his worst enemy.
- William Temple
The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as a person.
- Wendell Berry
you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth and i it was to isolate her out of the loud world so that it would have to flee us of necessity and then the sound of it would be as though it had never been
- William Faulkner
Dajem ti sat, ne da se prise?aš vremena, ve? da bi ga ponekad mogao na trenutak zaboraviti, da ne izgubiš dah pokušavaju?i da ga osvojiš. Jer bitke se nikad ne dobijaju. ?ak se i ne biju. Bojno polje samo otkriva ?oveku njegovu ludost i o?ajanje, a pobeda je uvek samo iluzija filozofa i glupaka... Moglo bi se pomisliti da ?e se nesre?a jednog dana umoriti, ali onda samo vreme postaje naša nesre?a.
- William Faulkner
Which explains a lot, having likewise noticed in my time that the goddess in charge of virtue seems to be the same one in charge of luck, if not of folly also.
- William Faulkner
The folly isn't mine. It's God's folly. Even in the old days he never asked men to do what was reasonable.
- William Golding
For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.
- Thomas Merton
In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.
- George Eliot