It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.
Abraham Lincoln
When knowledge is limited - it leads to folly... When knowledge exceeds a certain limit, it leads to exploitation.
Abu Bakr
Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today's wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the cemeteries of France and Belgium - and tens of millions of Americans will feel a similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with others' lives.
Adam Hochschild
True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.
Akhenaton
To be bowed by grief is folly; Naught is gained by melancholy; Better than the pain of thinking, Is to steep the sense in drinking.
Alcaeus
The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people. In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.
Alexander Hamilton
Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.
Alexander Pope
Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
Ambrose Bierce
Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
Anatole France
Always the cat remains a little beyond the limits we try to set for him in our blind folly.
Andre Norton
We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
I think it's a lovely idea, but it will not pass the Congress. I live in a world of realities. The policy of our country is that we can drill our way to independence. I think that's a march to folly.
Anna Eshoo
Each is under the most sacred obligation not to squander the material committed to him, not to sap his strength in folly and vice, and to see at the least that he delivers a product worthy the labor and cost which have been expended on him.
Anna Julia Cooper
This Old Testament - containing error, folly, absurdity and immorality - is by English statute law declared to be of divine authority, a blasphemy - if there were anyone to be blasphemed - blacker and more insolent than any word ever written or penned by the most hotheaded Freethinker.
Annie Besant
His foe was folly and his weapon wit.
Anthony Hope
A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.
Antonin Scalia
The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.
Atom Egoyan
Everything a teenager does, says or looks at, however transitory, contributes to an aggregated virtual self that might one day have consequences for its real-life counterpart. How many of us would keep all our relationships and reputations intact if every transgression, mistake or youthful folly was held in public view?
Beeban Kidron
Beauty and folly are old companions.
Benjamin Franklin
The main threads running through the lives of W. A. Clark and his daughter Huguette include the costs of ambition, the burdens of inherited wealth, the fragility of reputation, the folly of judging someone's life from the outside, and the tension between engaging with the world, with all its risks, and keeping a safe distance from danger.
To me, it's the folly of man to make God human.
Let the politicians debate equal pay and pursue the folly of a war on women in America.
The folly of endless consumerism sends us on a wild goose-chase for happiness through materialism.
Much of the wisdom of one age, is the folly of the next.
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.
To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!
The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion, or delusion.
Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.
Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.
The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
To take my work seriously would be the height of folly.
Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.
Music is made one of Satan's most attractive agencies to ensnare souls; but, when turned to a good account, it is a blessing. When abused, it leads the unconsecrated to pride, vanity, and folly.
It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.
Away with that folly that her rights would be detrimental to her character - that if she were recognized as the equal to a man she would cease to be a woman!
Fear nothing but what thy industry may prevent; be confident of nothing but what fortune cannot defeat; it is no less folly to fear what is impossible to be avoided than to be secure when there is a possibility to be deprived.
It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.
He who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks.
Some accidents there are in life that a little folly is necessary to help us out of.
It's the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.
The 370-year-old antique shop Trifles and Folly is the heart of 'Deadly Curiosities,' my new urban fantasy novel from Solaris Books.
The right of property holds good in all society; but in the West, ethics invade the personal life in a manner unknown to the East, so much so that the Oriental stands agape at our folly, knowing well that every man brings different instincts and ideas into the world with him.
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
I've lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that's a lot of folly to witness up close. Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government.
Barack Obama's historic 2008 presidential campaign touched on all the themes I have covered throughout my career and all of the layers of meaning that run through black politics. Ambition. Aspiration. Fear. Folly. It was all on display as Obama boarded the roller coaster that ultimately led to the White House.
