It is sheer folly to take unwilling hounds to the chase.
If others had not been foolish, we should be so.
It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.
Too much trust is folly, in an imperfect world.
There ought to be no laws to guarantee property against the folly of its possessors.
Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.
Experiment is folly when experience shows the way.
It is folly to anticipate evils, and madness to create imaginary ones.
There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.
Would any thing but a madman complain of uncertainty? Uncertainty and expectation are joys of life; security is an insipid thing; and the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.
It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.
At sixty, I know little more about wisdom than I did at thirty, but I know a great deal more about folly.
The day will come, sooner or later, when people will wonder at the necessity of taking all this trouble to expose the folly of a system, so childish and absurd, and yet so often enforced at the point of a bayonet.
See now, how men lay blame upon us gods for what is after all nothing but their own folly.
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.
Among the many inconsistencies which folly produces or infirmity suffers in the human mind, there has often been observed a manifest and striking contrariety between the life of an author and his writings. . . Those whom the appearance of virtue or the evidence of genius has tempted to a nearer knowledge of the writer, in whose performances they may be found, have indeed had frequent reason to repent their curiosity.
The wisest among my race understand that agitations of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.
What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.
And if my present deeds are foolish in thy sight, it may be that a foolish judge arraigns my folly.
The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.