Fools, to talking ever prone
Are sure to make their follies known. [ Gay ]
But love is blind and lovers can not see
The pretty follies that themselves commit. [ William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act II. Sc. 6 ]
Fears of the brave and follies of the wise. [ Johnson ]
Leave such to trifle with more grace and ease.
Whom Folly pleases, and whose Follies please. [ Pope ]
Is she not a wilderness of faults and follies? [ Sheridan ]
There are as well serious follies, as light ones. [ Proverb ]
There are follies as catching as contagious disorders. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
A woman will confess her faults sooner than her follies. [ Alfred Bougeart ]
Man's chief wisdom consists in being sensible of his follies. [ Rochefoucauld ]
There are well-dressed follies, as there are well-clothed fools. [ Chamfort ]
He who is never guilty of follies is not so wise as he imagines. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Every man's follies are the caricature resemblances of his wisdom. [ John Sterling ]
Experience is the name men give to their follies, or their sorrows. [ A. de Musset ]
Well! sage Evhemere, what have you seen in all your travels?
Follies!
[ Voltaire ]
Love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit. [ William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice ]
There are some passions so sweet that they excuse all the follies they provoke. [ Rochebrune ]
America is a fortunate country. She grows by the follies of our European nations. [ Napoleon ]
Our follies and errors are the soiled steps to the Grecian temple of our perfection. [ Richter ]
Women, like men, may be persuaded to confess their faults; but their follies, never. [ Alfred de Musset ]
Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. [ T. Jefferson ]
When a man seems to be wise, it is merely that his follies are proportionate to his age and fortune. [ Rochefoucauld ]
All of us who are worth anything spend our manhood in unlearning the follies or expiating the mistakes of our youth. [ Shelley ]
He whose life seems fair, if all his errors and follies were articled against him, would seem vicious and miserable. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
There are certain people fated to be fools; they not only commit follies by choice, but are even constrained to do so by fortune. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Follies committed by sensible people, extravagances said by clever people, crimes committed by honest people: this is the history of revolutions. [ De Bonald ]
Men of all ages have the same inclinations, over which reason exercises no control. Thus, wherever men are found, there are follies, ay, and the same follies. [ La Fontaine ]
How many of us have been attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism. [ Lord Lytton ]
There is no man so great as not to have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness. Our virtues are the dupes, and often only the plaything of our follies. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]
Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies. [ Heine ]
There is so little to redeem the dry mass of follies and errors from which the materials of this life are composed that anything to love or to reverence becomes, as it were, the Sabbath for the mind. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
The follies, vices, and consequent miseries of multitudes, displayed in a newspaper, are so many admonitions and warnings, so many beacons, continually burning, to turn others from the rocks on which they have been shipwrecked. [ Bishop Horne ]
So long as thou art ignorant, be not ashamed to learn : he that is so fondly modest, not to acknowledge his own defects of knowledge, shall in time, be so foully impudent to justify his own ignorance; ignorance is the greatest of all infirmities, and, justified, the chiefest of all follies. [ Quarks ]
Legitimately produced, and truly inspired, fiction interprets humanity, informs the understanding, and quickens the affections. It reflects ourselves, warns us against prevailing social follies, adds rich specimens to our cabinets of character, dramatizes life for the unimaginative, daguerreotypes it for the unobservant, multiplies experience for the isolated or inactive, and cheers age, retirement and invalidism with an available and harmless solace. [ Tuckerman ]