People who think that love, sex, marriage, work, play, life and death are serious matters are urged NOT to read this book. Buy it, yes, but don't read it. [Regarding "The Fool's Progress"]
- Edward Abbey
Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" - which is but a matter of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET." - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
- Mark Twain
Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?
- Mark Twain
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
- Mark Twain
Why? Why do the fools fly?' said Denethor. 'Better to burn sooner than late, for burn we must. Go back to your bonfire! And I? I will go now to my pyre. To my pyre! No tomb for Denethor and Faramir. No tomb! No long slow sleep of death embalmed. We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West. The West has failed. Go back and burn!
- J R R Tolkien
The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
- Walter Lippmann
The fool within himself is the object of pity, until he is flattered.
- Richard Steele
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
The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.
- Paulo Coelho
Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
- Sholom Aleichem
I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest.
- Alexandre Dumas
Dare to wear the foolish clown face.
- Frank Sinatra
Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
- Thomas B Macaulay
..all forms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for keeping the foolish from applying their hearts to wisdom.
- Elizabeth Von Arnim
It works both ways: there are victims of tragedy who come to me who have experienced grief of such magnitude that they cannot reconcile. Likewise, I cannot change the mentality of those who committed the crimes or the fools who followed them.
- Paddy Ashdown
The most perceptive character in a play is the fool, because the man who wishes to seem simple cannot possibly be a simpleton.
- Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.
- Marcus Aurelius
Nay," cried Bingley, "this is too much, to remember at night all the foolish things that were said in the morning.
- Jane Austen
Sharp and mild, dull and keen,
well known and strange, dirty and clean,
where both the fool and wise are seen:
All this am I, have ever been, -
in me dove, snake and swine convene!
- Friedrich Nietzsche
JACK: I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.
ALGERNON: We have.
JACK: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?
ALGERNON: The fools? Oh! about the clever people of course.
JACK: What fools.
- Oscar Wilde
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
- Oscar Wilde
With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools' Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devils' Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade.
- Oscar Wilde
You've got to learn to accept the fool in you as well as the part that's got it goin' on.
- Tyra Banks
I've married a man who owns nine cows," said Jinjur to Ozma, "and now I am happy and contented and willing to lead a quiet life and mind my own business."
"Where is your husband?" asked Ozma.
"He is in the house, nursing a black eye," replied Jinjur, calmly. "The foolish man would insist upon milking the red cow when I wanted him to milk the white one; but he will know better next time, I am sure.
- L Frank Baum
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
It's the fools that make all the trouble in the world, not the wicked.
- L M Montgomery
As she walked along she dramatized the night. There was about it a wild, lawless charm that appealed to a certain wild, lawless strain hidden deep in Emily's naturethe strain of the gypsy and the poet, the genius and the fool.
- L M Montgomery
The fool supply was controlled..
- John Steinbeck
The most difficult part of being a mother was to observe the mistakes of one's children: the foolish loves, the desperate solitude and alienation, the lack of will, the gullibility, the joyous and naive leaps into the unknown, the ignorance, the panicky choices and the utter determination.
- David Bergen
Sometimes the fool who rushes in gets the job done.
- Al Bernstein
Education, n.: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
- Ambrose Bierce
Take all the fools out of this world and there wouldn't be any fun living in it, or profit.
- Josh Billings
The Wise are silent, the Foolish speak, and children are thus led astray.
- Algernon Blackwood
The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.
- William Blake
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
- William Blake
Love works a different way in different minds, the fool it enlightens and the wise it blinds.
- John Dryden
None are so busy as the fool and knave.
- John Dryden
However big the fool, there is always a bigger fool to admire him.
- Nicolas Boileaudespreaux
This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, And to do that well craves a kind of wit.
- William Shakespeare
Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
- Samuel Johnson
In them, she saw the sham of her life laid out like a book, the foolish belief that she, that anyone, could escape the consequences of this world, could flee from death. That was the deceit. The true serpent in the garden.
- Libba Bray
As favor and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.
- Jean De La Bruyere
morning night and noon
the traffic moves through
and the murder and treachery
of friends and lovers
and all the people
move through you.
pain is the joy of knowing
the unkindest truth
that arrives without
warning.
life is being alone
death is being alone.
even the fools weep
morning night and noon.
- Charles Bukowski
A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool.
- Edward G Bulwerlytton
I'll distract them," Carter said. "You search. The Trophy room is through there."
"Carter!"
But the fool ran off to protect me. I hate when he does that.
- Rick Riordan
Woe to him who could look on and say: The fool! If she had waited, if she had let time do its work, her despair would surely have subsided, another man would have turned up to comfort her. That's just like saying: The fool, dying of fever! If she had waited until his strength returned, his circulation improved, the tumult of his blood calmed down, everything would have turned out well and he would still be alive today!
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
- Octavia Butler
The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
- William Hazlitt
We are the fools of Time and Terror: Days Steal on us, and steal from us; yet we live, Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.
- George Byron
Insisting on maintaining dignity at all costs is paralyzing. Mistakes are informative, and so is playing the fool
- Patrick Califia Rice
I am the fool in this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.
- Gilbert K Chesterton
The wise man draws more advantage from his enemies than the fool from his friends.
- Benjamin Franklin
The fool inherits, but the wise must get.
- William Cartwright
The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
- Miguel De Cervantes
The serpent, the king, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool: these seven ought not to be awakened from sleep.
- Chanakya
Every success story has a parent who says, 'over my dead body.' Every success story has an old person who walks up to you and says, when you're acting the fool, 'you know I worry about you sometimes.'
- Bill Cosby
Every man is a divinity in disguise; a god playing the fool.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
The fool is like those people who think themselves rich with little.
- Luc De Clapiers
I've lost track of where friendship ends and falling begins.
(this is the foolish refrain of the hopelessly devoted.)
there are times I want to kiss you midsentence.
undo the not-doing with one gesture.
- David Levithan
The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.
- Wilkie Collins
When a woman wants me to do anything (my daughter, or not, it doesn't matter), I always insist on knowing why. The oftener you make them rummage their own minds for a reason, the more manageable you will find them in all the relations of life. It isn't their fault (poor wretches!) that they act first and think afterwards; it's the fault of the fools who humour them.
- Wilkie Collins
The mistakes of the fool are known to the world, but not to himself. The mistakes of the wise man are known to himself, but not to the world.
- Charles Caleb Colton
I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devilI don't know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing placeand whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won't pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other.
- Joseph Conrad
I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.
- Henry David Thoreau
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
The fools among us are presented to be wise and the wise among us are presented to be fools.
- Santosh Kalwar
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
- Frank Dane
Only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn't unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn't want to.
- John Green
I couldn't be mad at him for even a moment, and only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation..
- John Green
How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.
- Philip K Dick
The fool wonders, the wise man asks.
- Benjamin Disraeli
It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The foolish are like ripples on water, For whatsoever they do is quickly effaced; But the righteous are like carvings upon stone, For their smallest act is durable.
- Horace
The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.
- Ursula K Le Guin
It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.
Resign yourself to be the fool you are...
...We must always take risks. That is our destiny..
- T S Eliot
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous
Almost, at times, the Fool.
- T S Eliot
In history, as elsewhere, fools rush in, and the angels may perhaps be forgiven if rather than tread in those treacherous paths they tread upon the fools instead.
- Geoffrey Rudolph Elton
It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.
- Epictetus
The fool's life is empty of gratitude and full of fears; its course lies wholly toward the future.
- Epicurus
The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.
- Epicurus
The die is set and Malcolm will not escape for the foolish talk he spoke against his benefactor, such a man, is worthy of death, and it would have been so, were it not for Muhammad's confidence that God would give him the victory over the enemies.
- Louis Farrakhan
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself a fool.
- Anatole France
The fool shouts loudly, thinking to impress the world.
- Marie De France
The fool wanders, a wise man travels.
- Thomas Fuller
Faith is the fool's excuse.
- James Frey
The wise man knows when to keep silent. Only the fool tells all he knows.
- Neil Gaiman
A wise man's questions surpass the answers of the fool, but the silence of the enlightened is divine. Meditation is the key.
- J Gabriel Gates
A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.
- Max Gluckman
Third Time tricked, marks the fool.
- Terry Goodkind
You can't argue with the fools in the world. It's better to let them have their way, then trick them when they're not paying attention.
- Terry Goodkind
The wise does at once what the fool does at last.
- Baltasar Gracian
Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool that follows it?
- Alec Guinness
No man is so much a fool as not to have wit enough sometimes to be a knave; nor any so cunning a knave as not to have the weakness sometimes to play the fool.
- George Savile
When a wise man does not understand, he says: "I do not understand." The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom.
- Frank Herbert
The fool knows after he's suffered.
- Hesiod
Ah, Catylast, can it be that you do not see all the changes you have made? Some by your resignation and acceptance of circumstance, some by your wild struggles. You say that you hate change, but you *are* change.
The Fool in Fool's Fate
- Robin Hobb
The wise know their limitations; the foolish do not.
- Benjamin Hoff
Even a wise man knows doubt from time to time, it is the fool who allows it to rule his judgement.
- Jennifer Hudock
All I have left is my anger at the foolishness of the world. The unnecessary cruelties, the pomposity and vanity of people who should know better. Most of the time I just want to shake some sense into the world.
- Stephen Hunt
The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?
- Henrik Ibsen
Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.
- P D James
He is a romantic, a dreamer, and never afraid to play the fool. He is fearless and reckless and brave and I love him for it. Desperately.
- Stacey Jay
I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money's a wedge in the world. But after I'd split it open a crack I looked in and saw the trick inside it, the filthy nothing, the fooled and rotten faces of rich and successful men.
- Robinson Jeffers
Some find it difficult to withstand the mocking and unsavory remarks of foolish ones who ridicule chastity, honesty, and obedience to God's commands. But the world has ever belittled adherence to principle. When Noah was instructed to build an ark, the foolish populace looked at the cloudless sky, then scoffed and jeereduntil the rain came.
- Thomas S Monson
There are two apples, one is green and the other is red. Which apple would the wise man choose? The answer is: I'll take the one you didn't choose. You see, you are the fool here, because I poisoned the first apple!
- Jarod Kintz
The learned is happy, nature to explore; The fool is happy, that he knows no more.
- Alexander Pope
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine..
- Walt Whitman
Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
- Karl Kraus
Showing off is the fool's idea of glory.
- Bruce Lee
We are all the foolishness and all the crimes we did. We're also all the kindnesses we did. I hate to think of life as if we understood time. We don't understand time.
- Hugh Leonard
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
- James Russell Lowell
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
- Niccolo Machiavelli
I adore Life. What do all the fools matter and all the stupidity. They do matter but somehow for me they cannot touch the body of Life. Life is marvellous. I want to be deeply rooted in it - to live - to expand - to breathe in it - to rejoice - to share it. To give and to be asked for Love.
- Katherine Mansfield
When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion.
- Phyllis Mcginley
Ahoy there, Lord Pegleg!" cried the Fool. "Why are you hopping on one foot?"
"And what would you have do on one foot?" the man asked. "Pirouette? Besides, if I were to untie my other foot I would move too fast for anyone to see me. Why, I would trip over the equator in one stride."
"That's pretty quick," the Fool said.
"If you think that's quick," the man replied, "you should have seen me before the old arthritis set in.
- Eric Metaxas
Ned knew what it was like to feel useless. He had been the expendable grandchild, the non-heir. He'd been the fool, the idiot, the one who could be counted on to muck up anything worth doing. His grandfather had expected nothing of Ned, and Ned, young idiot that he had been, had delivered spectacularly.
- Courtney Milan
Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.
- Yukio Mishima
But, hell, I wouldn't have grudged him your body. I know how little bodies mean - especially women's bodies. But I do grudge him your heart and your dear, hard, unscrupulous mind. He doesn't want your mind, the fool, and I don't want your body. I can buy women cheap. But I do want your mind and your heart, and I'll never have them.
- Margaret Mitchell
I want to make you faint. I will make you faint. You've had this coming to you for years. None of the fools you've known have kissed you like this - have they? Your precious Charles or Frank or your stupid Ashley... I said your stupid Ashley. Gentlemen all - what do they know about women? What do they know about you? I know you.
- Margaret Mitchell
Like looking down on a lubricious chess set, isn't it? The king moves in tiny steps, with no direction, like a drunkard trying to avoid the archer's bolt. The others work their strategies and wait for the old man to fall. He has no power, yet all power moves in his orbit and to his mad whim. Do you know there's no fool piece on the chessboard, Kent?" "Methinks the fool is the player, the mind above the moves.
- Christopher Moore
The fool's number is zero, but that's because he represents the infinite possibility of all things. He may become anything. See, he carries all of his possessions in a bundle on his back. He is ready for anything, to go anywhere, to become whatever he needs to be. Don't count out the fool, Pocket, simply because his number is zero.
- Christopher Moore
The cactus thrives in the desert while the fern thrives in the wetland.
The fool will try to plant them in the same flowerbox.
The florist will sigh and add a wall divider and proper soil to both sides.
The grandparent will move the flowerbox halfway out of the sun.
The child will turn it around properly so that the fern is in the shade, and not the cactus.
The moral of the story?
Kids are smart.
- Vera Nazarian
When everything seems to be set to show me off as intelligent, the fool I always keep hidden takes over all that I say.
- Pablo Neruda
Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.
- Simone Weil
One of the greatest evils is the foolishness of a good man. For the giving man to withhold helping someone in order to first assure personal fortification is not selfish, but to elude needless self-destruction; martyrdom is only practical when the thought is to die, else a good man faces the consequence of digging a hole from which he cannot escape, and truly helps no one in the long run.
- Mike Norton
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
- William Osler
Because you can't argue with all the fools in the world. It's easier to let them have their way, then trick them when they're not paying attention.
- Christopher Paolini
I look forward to a future of boredom and suffering, since I'm too cowardly to put an end to my days. I'll just go on: clubbing, snorting, drinking and persecuting the fools of the world.
- Lolita Pille
The foolish rush to end their lives.
Only the steadfast soul survives.
- Christine De Pizan
Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.
- Neil Postman
I'm with the fool in the psalm. You thought we could get on without you; no you didn't care whether we got on without you or not. You just got up and left. So that's what we're doing, we're getting on.
- Philip Pullman
But gratitude would not have me love you as I do. Love was inspired by what you are - the good, the bad, and even the foolish, which is what you're being right now.
- Mary Jo Putney
Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent.
- Ayn Rand
Religion was dangerous, anti-intellectual, a crutch for the masses, and a game for the foolish, the poor, and the hypocrites. (Jacques Miroux)
- Joel C Rosenberg
Your depression is connected to your insolence
and refusal to praise. Whoever feels himself walking
on the path, and refuses to praise--that man or woman
steals from others every day--is a shoplifter!
The sun became full of light when it got hold of itself.
Angels only began shining when they achieved discipline.
The sun goes out whenever the cloud of not-praising comes.
The moment the foolish angel felt insolent, he heard the door close.
- Rumi
Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.
- Salman Rushdie
Who is the madder,' Osman the clown whispered into his
bullock's ear as he groomed it in its small byre, 'the madwoman,
or the fool who loves the madwoman?' The bullock didn't reply.
'Maybe we should have stayed untouchable,' Osman continued. 'A compulsory ocean sounds worse than a forbidden well.' And the
bullock nodded, twice for yes, boom, boom.
- Salman Rushdie
I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
- James Thurber
The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention.
- Franz Schubert
Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.
- Kathryn Stockett
Wise is the one who learns from another's mistakes. Less wise is the one who learns only from his own mistakes. The fool keeps making the same mistakes again and again and never learns from them.
- Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
It is the fool who thinks he cannot be fooled.
- Joey Skaggs
I am the fool, and must be the sufferer, if it be not of God.
- Joanna Southcott
I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Baseball must be a great game to survive the fools who run it.
- Bill Terry
I've fallen in love with you. I love you even now when you sit before me with the eyes of a wolf. So take pity upon the fool I have become. I forgot it was only a bargain between us.
- Ronda Thompson
Sorry is the fool who trades his soul for a corvette Thinks he'll get the girl he'll only get the mechanic.
- Eddie Vedder
Lecktrickery? grinned the fool boys, rubbing their rabbits' feet against the spell of these longest syllables in all Tarnation.
- William T Vollmann
Love doesn't come along too often. Believe me, I know. When it does, only the foolish let it fade. Even if it is him.
- H M Ward
The foolish and cruel notion that a wife is to obey her husband has sent more women to the grave than to the courts for a divorce.
- Lemuel K Washburn
The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.
- George Washington
I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.
- Edmund Wilson
But, Ed! Say! Are you going to let him get away with it?"
"Am I going to let him get away with it!" said Mr. Cootes, annoyed by the foolish question. "Wake me up in the night and ask me!"
"But what are you going to do?"
"Do!" said Mr. Cootes. "Do! I'll tell you what I'm going to..." He paused, and the stern resolve that shone in his face seemed to flicker. "Say, what the hell am I going do?" he went on somewhat weakly.
- P G Wodehouse
Luck is merely an illusion, trusted by the ignorant and chased by the foolish.
- Timothy Zahn
- Edward Abbey
Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" - which is but a matter of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET." - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
- Mark Twain
Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?
- Mark Twain
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
- Mark Twain
Why? Why do the fools fly?' said Denethor. 'Better to burn sooner than late, for burn we must. Go back to your bonfire! And I? I will go now to my pyre. To my pyre! No tomb for Denethor and Faramir. No tomb! No long slow sleep of death embalmed. We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West. The West has failed. Go back and burn!
- J R R Tolkien
The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
- Walter Lippmann
The fool within himself is the object of pity, until he is flattered.
- Richard Steele
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
The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.
- Paulo Coelho
Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
- Sholom Aleichem
I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest.
- Alexandre Dumas
Dare to wear the foolish clown face.
- Frank Sinatra
Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
- Thomas B Macaulay
..all forms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for keeping the foolish from applying their hearts to wisdom.
- Elizabeth Von Arnim
It works both ways: there are victims of tragedy who come to me who have experienced grief of such magnitude that they cannot reconcile. Likewise, I cannot change the mentality of those who committed the crimes or the fools who followed them.
- Paddy Ashdown
The most perceptive character in a play is the fool, because the man who wishes to seem simple cannot possibly be a simpleton.
- Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.
- Marcus Aurelius
Nay," cried Bingley, "this is too much, to remember at night all the foolish things that were said in the morning.
- Jane Austen
Sharp and mild, dull and keen,
well known and strange, dirty and clean,
where both the fool and wise are seen:
All this am I, have ever been, -
in me dove, snake and swine convene!
- Friedrich Nietzsche
JACK: I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.
ALGERNON: We have.
JACK: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?
ALGERNON: The fools? Oh! about the clever people of course.
JACK: What fools.
- Oscar Wilde
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
- Oscar Wilde
With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools' Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devils' Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade.
- Oscar Wilde
You've got to learn to accept the fool in you as well as the part that's got it goin' on.
- Tyra Banks
I've married a man who owns nine cows," said Jinjur to Ozma, "and now I am happy and contented and willing to lead a quiet life and mind my own business."
"Where is your husband?" asked Ozma.
"He is in the house, nursing a black eye," replied Jinjur, calmly. "The foolish man would insist upon milking the red cow when I wanted him to milk the white one; but he will know better next time, I am sure.
- L Frank Baum
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
It's the fools that make all the trouble in the world, not the wicked.
- L M Montgomery
As she walked along she dramatized the night. There was about it a wild, lawless charm that appealed to a certain wild, lawless strain hidden deep in Emily's naturethe strain of the gypsy and the poet, the genius and the fool.
- L M Montgomery
The fool supply was controlled..
- John Steinbeck
The most difficult part of being a mother was to observe the mistakes of one's children: the foolish loves, the desperate solitude and alienation, the lack of will, the gullibility, the joyous and naive leaps into the unknown, the ignorance, the panicky choices and the utter determination.
- David Bergen
Sometimes the fool who rushes in gets the job done.
- Al Bernstein
Education, n.: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
- Ambrose Bierce
Take all the fools out of this world and there wouldn't be any fun living in it, or profit.
- Josh Billings
The Wise are silent, the Foolish speak, and children are thus led astray.
- Algernon Blackwood
The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.
- William Blake
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
- William Blake
Love works a different way in different minds, the fool it enlightens and the wise it blinds.
- John Dryden
None are so busy as the fool and knave.
- John Dryden
However big the fool, there is always a bigger fool to admire him.
- Nicolas Boileaudespreaux
This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, And to do that well craves a kind of wit.
- William Shakespeare
Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
- Samuel Johnson
In them, she saw the sham of her life laid out like a book, the foolish belief that she, that anyone, could escape the consequences of this world, could flee from death. That was the deceit. The true serpent in the garden.
- Libba Bray
As favor and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.
- Jean De La Bruyere
morning night and noon
the traffic moves through
and the murder and treachery
of friends and lovers
and all the people
move through you.
pain is the joy of knowing
the unkindest truth
that arrives without
warning.
life is being alone
death is being alone.
even the fools weep
morning night and noon.
- Charles Bukowski
A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool.
- Edward G Bulwerlytton
I'll distract them," Carter said. "You search. The Trophy room is through there."
"Carter!"
But the fool ran off to protect me. I hate when he does that.
- Rick Riordan
Woe to him who could look on and say: The fool! If she had waited, if she had let time do its work, her despair would surely have subsided, another man would have turned up to comfort her. That's just like saying: The fool, dying of fever! If she had waited until his strength returned, his circulation improved, the tumult of his blood calmed down, everything would have turned out well and he would still be alive today!
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
- Octavia Butler
The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
- William Hazlitt
We are the fools of Time and Terror: Days Steal on us, and steal from us; yet we live, Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.
- George Byron
Insisting on maintaining dignity at all costs is paralyzing. Mistakes are informative, and so is playing the fool
- Patrick Califia Rice
I am the fool in this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.
- Gilbert K Chesterton
The wise man draws more advantage from his enemies than the fool from his friends.
- Benjamin Franklin
The fool inherits, but the wise must get.
- William Cartwright
The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
- Miguel De Cervantes
The serpent, the king, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool: these seven ought not to be awakened from sleep.
- Chanakya
Every success story has a parent who says, 'over my dead body.' Every success story has an old person who walks up to you and says, when you're acting the fool, 'you know I worry about you sometimes.'
- Bill Cosby
Every man is a divinity in disguise; a god playing the fool.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
The fool is like those people who think themselves rich with little.
- Luc De Clapiers
I've lost track of where friendship ends and falling begins.
(this is the foolish refrain of the hopelessly devoted.)
there are times I want to kiss you midsentence.
undo the not-doing with one gesture.
- David Levithan
The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.
- Wilkie Collins
When a woman wants me to do anything (my daughter, or not, it doesn't matter), I always insist on knowing why. The oftener you make them rummage their own minds for a reason, the more manageable you will find them in all the relations of life. It isn't their fault (poor wretches!) that they act first and think afterwards; it's the fault of the fools who humour them.
- Wilkie Collins
The mistakes of the fool are known to the world, but not to himself. The mistakes of the wise man are known to himself, but not to the world.
- Charles Caleb Colton
I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devilI don't know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing placeand whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won't pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other.
- Joseph Conrad
I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.
- Henry David Thoreau
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
The fools among us are presented to be wise and the wise among us are presented to be fools.
- Santosh Kalwar
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
- Frank Dane
Only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn't unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn't want to.
- John Green
I couldn't be mad at him for even a moment, and only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation..
- John Green
How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.
- Philip K Dick
The fool wonders, the wise man asks.
- Benjamin Disraeli
It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The foolish are like ripples on water, For whatsoever they do is quickly effaced; But the righteous are like carvings upon stone, For their smallest act is durable.
- Horace
The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.
- Ursula K Le Guin
It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.
Resign yourself to be the fool you are...
...We must always take risks. That is our destiny..
- T S Eliot
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous
Almost, at times, the Fool.
- T S Eliot
In history, as elsewhere, fools rush in, and the angels may perhaps be forgiven if rather than tread in those treacherous paths they tread upon the fools instead.
- Geoffrey Rudolph Elton
It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.
- Epictetus
The fool's life is empty of gratitude and full of fears; its course lies wholly toward the future.
- Epicurus
The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.
- Epicurus
The die is set and Malcolm will not escape for the foolish talk he spoke against his benefactor, such a man, is worthy of death, and it would have been so, were it not for Muhammad's confidence that God would give him the victory over the enemies.
- Louis Farrakhan
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself a fool.
- Anatole France
The fool shouts loudly, thinking to impress the world.
- Marie De France
The fool wanders, a wise man travels.
- Thomas Fuller
Faith is the fool's excuse.
- James Frey
The wise man knows when to keep silent. Only the fool tells all he knows.
- Neil Gaiman
A wise man's questions surpass the answers of the fool, but the silence of the enlightened is divine. Meditation is the key.
- J Gabriel Gates
A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.
- Max Gluckman
Third Time tricked, marks the fool.
- Terry Goodkind
You can't argue with the fools in the world. It's better to let them have their way, then trick them when they're not paying attention.
- Terry Goodkind
The wise does at once what the fool does at last.
- Baltasar Gracian
Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool that follows it?
- Alec Guinness
No man is so much a fool as not to have wit enough sometimes to be a knave; nor any so cunning a knave as not to have the weakness sometimes to play the fool.
- George Savile
When a wise man does not understand, he says: "I do not understand." The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom.
- Frank Herbert
The fool knows after he's suffered.
- Hesiod
Ah, Catylast, can it be that you do not see all the changes you have made? Some by your resignation and acceptance of circumstance, some by your wild struggles. You say that you hate change, but you *are* change.
The Fool in Fool's Fate
- Robin Hobb
The wise know their limitations; the foolish do not.
- Benjamin Hoff
Even a wise man knows doubt from time to time, it is the fool who allows it to rule his judgement.
- Jennifer Hudock
All I have left is my anger at the foolishness of the world. The unnecessary cruelties, the pomposity and vanity of people who should know better. Most of the time I just want to shake some sense into the world.
- Stephen Hunt
The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?
- Henrik Ibsen
Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.
- P D James
He is a romantic, a dreamer, and never afraid to play the fool. He is fearless and reckless and brave and I love him for it. Desperately.
- Stacey Jay
I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money's a wedge in the world. But after I'd split it open a crack I looked in and saw the trick inside it, the filthy nothing, the fooled and rotten faces of rich and successful men.
- Robinson Jeffers
Some find it difficult to withstand the mocking and unsavory remarks of foolish ones who ridicule chastity, honesty, and obedience to God's commands. But the world has ever belittled adherence to principle. When Noah was instructed to build an ark, the foolish populace looked at the cloudless sky, then scoffed and jeereduntil the rain came.
- Thomas S Monson
There are two apples, one is green and the other is red. Which apple would the wise man choose? The answer is: I'll take the one you didn't choose. You see, you are the fool here, because I poisoned the first apple!
- Jarod Kintz
The learned is happy, nature to explore; The fool is happy, that he knows no more.
- Alexander Pope
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine..
- Walt Whitman
Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
- Karl Kraus
Showing off is the fool's idea of glory.
- Bruce Lee
We are all the foolishness and all the crimes we did. We're also all the kindnesses we did. I hate to think of life as if we understood time. We don't understand time.
- Hugh Leonard
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
- James Russell Lowell
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
- Niccolo Machiavelli
I adore Life. What do all the fools matter and all the stupidity. They do matter but somehow for me they cannot touch the body of Life. Life is marvellous. I want to be deeply rooted in it - to live - to expand - to breathe in it - to rejoice - to share it. To give and to be asked for Love.
- Katherine Mansfield
When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion.
- Phyllis Mcginley
Ahoy there, Lord Pegleg!" cried the Fool. "Why are you hopping on one foot?"
"And what would you have do on one foot?" the man asked. "Pirouette? Besides, if I were to untie my other foot I would move too fast for anyone to see me. Why, I would trip over the equator in one stride."
"That's pretty quick," the Fool said.
"If you think that's quick," the man replied, "you should have seen me before the old arthritis set in.
- Eric Metaxas
Ned knew what it was like to feel useless. He had been the expendable grandchild, the non-heir. He'd been the fool, the idiot, the one who could be counted on to muck up anything worth doing. His grandfather had expected nothing of Ned, and Ned, young idiot that he had been, had delivered spectacularly.
- Courtney Milan
Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.
- Yukio Mishima
But, hell, I wouldn't have grudged him your body. I know how little bodies mean - especially women's bodies. But I do grudge him your heart and your dear, hard, unscrupulous mind. He doesn't want your mind, the fool, and I don't want your body. I can buy women cheap. But I do want your mind and your heart, and I'll never have them.
- Margaret Mitchell
I want to make you faint. I will make you faint. You've had this coming to you for years. None of the fools you've known have kissed you like this - have they? Your precious Charles or Frank or your stupid Ashley... I said your stupid Ashley. Gentlemen all - what do they know about women? What do they know about you? I know you.
- Margaret Mitchell
Like looking down on a lubricious chess set, isn't it? The king moves in tiny steps, with no direction, like a drunkard trying to avoid the archer's bolt. The others work their strategies and wait for the old man to fall. He has no power, yet all power moves in his orbit and to his mad whim. Do you know there's no fool piece on the chessboard, Kent?" "Methinks the fool is the player, the mind above the moves.
- Christopher Moore
The fool's number is zero, but that's because he represents the infinite possibility of all things. He may become anything. See, he carries all of his possessions in a bundle on his back. He is ready for anything, to go anywhere, to become whatever he needs to be. Don't count out the fool, Pocket, simply because his number is zero.
- Christopher Moore
The cactus thrives in the desert while the fern thrives in the wetland.
The fool will try to plant them in the same flowerbox.
The florist will sigh and add a wall divider and proper soil to both sides.
The grandparent will move the flowerbox halfway out of the sun.
The child will turn it around properly so that the fern is in the shade, and not the cactus.
The moral of the story?
Kids are smart.
- Vera Nazarian
When everything seems to be set to show me off as intelligent, the fool I always keep hidden takes over all that I say.
- Pablo Neruda
Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.
- Simone Weil
One of the greatest evils is the foolishness of a good man. For the giving man to withhold helping someone in order to first assure personal fortification is not selfish, but to elude needless self-destruction; martyrdom is only practical when the thought is to die, else a good man faces the consequence of digging a hole from which he cannot escape, and truly helps no one in the long run.
- Mike Norton
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
- William Osler
Because you can't argue with all the fools in the world. It's easier to let them have their way, then trick them when they're not paying attention.
- Christopher Paolini
I look forward to a future of boredom and suffering, since I'm too cowardly to put an end to my days. I'll just go on: clubbing, snorting, drinking and persecuting the fools of the world.
- Lolita Pille
The foolish rush to end their lives.
Only the steadfast soul survives.
- Christine De Pizan
Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.
- Neil Postman
I'm with the fool in the psalm. You thought we could get on without you; no you didn't care whether we got on without you or not. You just got up and left. So that's what we're doing, we're getting on.
- Philip Pullman
But gratitude would not have me love you as I do. Love was inspired by what you are - the good, the bad, and even the foolish, which is what you're being right now.
- Mary Jo Putney
Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent.
- Ayn Rand
Religion was dangerous, anti-intellectual, a crutch for the masses, and a game for the foolish, the poor, and the hypocrites. (Jacques Miroux)
- Joel C Rosenberg
Your depression is connected to your insolence
and refusal to praise. Whoever feels himself walking
on the path, and refuses to praise--that man or woman
steals from others every day--is a shoplifter!
The sun became full of light when it got hold of itself.
Angels only began shining when they achieved discipline.
The sun goes out whenever the cloud of not-praising comes.
The moment the foolish angel felt insolent, he heard the door close.
- Rumi
Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.
- Salman Rushdie
Who is the madder,' Osman the clown whispered into his
bullock's ear as he groomed it in its small byre, 'the madwoman,
or the fool who loves the madwoman?' The bullock didn't reply.
'Maybe we should have stayed untouchable,' Osman continued. 'A compulsory ocean sounds worse than a forbidden well.' And the
bullock nodded, twice for yes, boom, boom.
- Salman Rushdie
I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
- James Thurber
The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention.
- Franz Schubert
Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.
- Kathryn Stockett
Wise is the one who learns from another's mistakes. Less wise is the one who learns only from his own mistakes. The fool keeps making the same mistakes again and again and never learns from them.
- Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
It is the fool who thinks he cannot be fooled.
- Joey Skaggs
I am the fool, and must be the sufferer, if it be not of God.
- Joanna Southcott
I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Baseball must be a great game to survive the fools who run it.
- Bill Terry
I've fallen in love with you. I love you even now when you sit before me with the eyes of a wolf. So take pity upon the fool I have become. I forgot it was only a bargain between us.
- Ronda Thompson
Sorry is the fool who trades his soul for a corvette Thinks he'll get the girl he'll only get the mechanic.
- Eddie Vedder
Lecktrickery? grinned the fool boys, rubbing their rabbits' feet against the spell of these longest syllables in all Tarnation.
- William T Vollmann
Love doesn't come along too often. Believe me, I know. When it does, only the foolish let it fade. Even if it is him.
- H M Ward
The foolish and cruel notion that a wife is to obey her husband has sent more women to the grave than to the courts for a divorce.
- Lemuel K Washburn
The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.
- George Washington
I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.
- Edmund Wilson
But, Ed! Say! Are you going to let him get away with it?"
"Am I going to let him get away with it!" said Mr. Cootes, annoyed by the foolish question. "Wake me up in the night and ask me!"
"But what are you going to do?"
"Do!" said Mr. Cootes. "Do! I'll tell you what I'm going to..." He paused, and the stern resolve that shone in his face seemed to flicker. "Say, what the hell am I going do?" he went on somewhat weakly.
- P G Wodehouse
Luck is merely an illusion, trusted by the ignorant and chased by the foolish.
- Timothy Zahn
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