Erasmus Folly Quotes

#1. 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. #Quote by Atom Egoyan

#2. An ounce of naivety can earn you many days of shame. An ounce of stupidity can earn you a hundred days of shame. An ounce of insensibility can earn you a thousand days of shame. An ounce of folly can earn you countless days of shame. #Quote by Matshona Dhliwayo

#3. We say that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful. #Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

#4. 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. #Quote by Andrew Coyle Bradley

#5. Here was a manifestation of a huge, historic British folly, repeated over many centuries including the twenty-first: the adoption of gesture strategy, committing small forces as an earnest of good intentions, heedless of their gross inadequacy for the military purpose at hand. #Quote by Max Hastings

#6. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise #Quote by William Blake

#7. The mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first. #Quote by Erasmus Darwin

#8. This religion so great in miracles, in men holy, pure and irreproachable, in scholars, great witnesses and martyrs, established kings - David - Isaiah, a prince of the blood; so great in knowledge, after displaying all its miracles and all its wisdom, rejects it all and says that it offers neither wisdom nor signs, but only the Cross and folly. #Quote by Blaise Pascal

#9. A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting. #Quote by Carlos Castaneda

#10. With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings. #Quote by Robert Walser

#11. The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: "the greater fool theory." Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world. #Quote by Michael Pollan

#12. A tree which has lost its head will never recover it again, and will survive only as a monument of the ignorance and folly of its Tormentor. #Quote by George William Curtis

#13. and madness and folly. For what can the man do who comes after the king? Only #Quote by Anonymous

#14. If in the heat of the dispute he insists and asks, 'Am I not the master of throwing myself out of the window?' I shall answer him, no; that whilst he preserves his reason there is no probability that the desire of proving his free agency, will become a motive sufficiently powerful to make him sacrifice his life to the attempt: if, notwithstanding this, to prove he is a free agent, he should actually precipitate himself from the window, it would not be a sufficient warranty to conclude he acted freely, but rather that it was the violence of his temperament which spurred him on to this folly. Madness is a state, that depends upon the heat of the blood, not upon the will. A fanatic or a hero, braves death as necessarily as a more phlegmatic man or a coward flies from it. #Quote by Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach

#15. Humility is truth. #Quote by Desiderius Erasmus

#16. They are the follies inherent to youth; I make sport of them, and, if you are kind, you will not yourself refuse them a good-natured smile. #Quote by Giacomo Casanova

#17. One would always want to think of oneself as being on the side of love, ready to recognize it and wish it well -but, when confronted with it in others, one so often resented it, questioned its true nature, secretly dismissed the particular instance as folly or promiscuity. Was it merely jealousy, or a reluctance to admit so noble and enviable a sentiment in anyone but oneself? #Quote by Shirley Hazzard

#18. Surely nothing is more reproachful to a being endowed with reason, than to resign its powers to the influence of the air, and live in dependence on the weather and the wind, for the only blessings which nature has put into our power, tranquillity and benevolence. To look up to the sky for the nutriment of our bodies, is the condition of nature; to call upon the sun for peace and gaiety, or deprecate the clouds lest sorrow should overwhelm us, is the cowardice of idleness, and the idolatry of folly. #Quote by Samuel Johnson

#19. Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars. #Quote by Tom Robbins

#20. Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise. #Quote by Samuel Johnson

#21. Sweet bird, that shun the noise of folly, most musical, most melancholy! #Quote by John Milton

#22. since the wickedness of the Evil One has prevailed so mightily against man's nature as even to drive some into denying the existence of God, that most foolish and woe-fulest pit of destruction (whose folly David, revealer of the Divine meaning, exposed when he said(9), The fool said in his heart, There is no God), #Quote by John Damascene

#23. Meanwhile the Viscount of Sylvania, who could no longer walk, now seldom left his castle. His friends and his family were with him all day, and he could own up to the most blameworthy folly, the most absurd extravagance, state the most flagrant paradox, or imply the most shocking fault without his kinsmen reproaching him or his friends joking or disagreeing with him. It was as if they had tacitly absolved him of any responsibility for his deeds and words. Above all they seemed to be trying to keep him from hearing the last sounds, to muffle with sweetness, if not drown out with tenderness, the final creakings of his body, from which life was ebbing. #Quote by Marcel Proust

#24. He stood watching the approaching locamotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands. #Quote by Willa Cather

#25. IT is reported of Margaret Fuller that she said she accepted the universe. "Gad, she'd better!" retorted Carlyle. Carlyle himself did not accept the universe in a very whole-hearted manner. Looking up at the midnight stars, he exclaimed: "A sad spectacle! If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space!" #Quote by John Burroughs

#26. I replied that England (the dear place of my nativity) was computed to produce three times the quantity of food, more than its inhabitants are able to consume, ... But, in order to feed the luxury and intemperance of the males, and the vanity of the females, we sent away the greatest part of our necessary things to other countries, from whence in return we brought the materials of diseases, folly, and vice, to spend among ourselves. Hence it follows of necessity that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, forswearing, flattering, suborning, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, freethinking, #Quote by Jonathan Swift

#27. The folly which we might have ourselves committed is the one which we are least ready to pardon in another. #Quote by Joseph Roux

#28. I think of the love of God as a great river, pouring through us even as the waters pour through our ravine at floodtime. Nothing can keep this love from pouring through us, except of course our own blocking of the river. Do you sometimes feel that you have got to the end of your love for someone who refuses and repulses you? Such a thought is folly, for one cannot come to the end of what one has not got. We have no store of love at all. We are not jugs, we are riverbeds. #Quote by Amy Carmichael

#29. It is a mistake easily made by every man, saint or scholar, Church leader or day laborer. Ultimately, we come to expect God to accept our understanding of what his will ought to be and to help us fulfill that, instead of learning to see and accept his will in the real situations in which he places us daily. The simple soul who each day makes a morning offering of "all the prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day" - and who then acts upon it by accepting unquestioningly and responding lovingly to all the situations of the day as truly sent by God - has perceived with an almost childlike faith the profound truth about the will of God. To predict what God's will is going to be, to rationalize about what his will must be, is at once a work of human folly and yet the subtlest of all temptations. The plain and simple truth is that his will is that he actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people, and problems. The trick is to learn to see that - not just in theory, or not just occasionally in a flash of insight granted by God's grace, but every day. #Quote by Father Walter J. Ciszek

#30. You cannot commit the folly of underestimating the power of a mother. #Quote by Girdhar Joshi

#31. Folly it may seem. Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him ... . We live now upon an island amid many perils, and our hands are more often upon the bowstring than upon the harp #Quote by J.R.R. Tolkien

#32. Though age from folly could not give me freedom, It does from childishness. #Quote by William Shakespeare

#33. The late Mr. David Hume, in his posthumous works, places the powers of generation much above those of our boasted reason; and adds, that reason can only make a machine, as a clock or a ship, but the power of generation makes the maker of the machine; ... he concludes, that the world itself might have been generated, rather than created ; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fiat. #Quote by Erasmus Darwin

#34. It is the greatest folly that is in Babel for people to strive about religion, so that they contend vehemently about opinions of their own forging, viz. #Quote by Jakob Bohme

#35. Though it is folly to suppose that happiness is a matter of volition, and that we can make ourselves content and cheerful whenever we choose a theory that many poor hypochondriacs are taunted with till they are nigh driven mad yet, on the other hand, no sane mind is ever left without the power of self-discipline and self-control in a measure, which measure increases in proportion as it is exercised. #Quote by Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

#36. Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities we possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy. #Quote by William Hazlitt

#37. In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. #Quote by Charles Mackay

#38. How sometimes nature will betray its folly, Its tenderness, and make itself a pastime To harder bosoms! #Quote by William Shakespeare

#39. Mike Stanton is our preeminent aficionado and raconteur of Rhode Island's flamboyantly criminal political follies, and The Prince of Providence is the chronicle of a great American rogue, Mayor Buddy Cianci - a paragon of charisma and corruption. #Quote by Philip Gourevitch

#40. It's the generally accepted privilege of theologians to stretch the heavens, that is the Scriptures, like tanners with a hide. #Quote by Desiderius Erasmus

#41. The daughter is the goddess, separately or together, of Infatuation, Mischief, Delusion and Blind Folly, rendering her victims "incapable of rational choice" and blind to distinctions of morality and expedience. #Quote by Barbara W. Tuchman

#42. Let us think often that our only business in this life is to please God. Perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity. #Quote by Brother Lawrence

#43. Oh, I was but a wounded Beast

Oh, I was but a wounded Beast
Teeth gnashing from a brutal feast
Wolfing down with others; consuming every bite
Eating every poison laid before my sight
I dined upon Iniquity's endless shelf
Blindly feeding, greedily…on myself

Oh, I was but a wounded Beast
Expiring with every taste of yeast
Belly puffed and sour with death
A haunting shutter with every breath
Full of nothing but vanity
Dipped in pleasure and tragedy

Oh, I was but a wounded Beast
As the West is far from the East
I charted the lust of mine own eyes
Thus, in my folly…I was sure to die
My soul knew nothing of sacrifice
Instead I danced with every vice

Oh, I was but a wounded Beast
You found me broken and utterly fleeced
Naked, abandoned and truly alone
You nurtured the wounds to which you sewn
You gave me bread, You sang me a song
And touched my wounds with a loving balm

Oh, I was but a wounded Beast
Yet, You taught me wisdom's leash
So I walk with you…dawn through night
Quenched by your fount of love and light
No darkness, no hate not a selfish bone
Can feed this fiend that You've atoned

Oh, I was, but a wounded Beast!
~Jason Neville Versey #Quote by Jason Versey

#44. Then he offers me his arm. As I take it, I wonder what folly decreed that women cannot walk unassisted. #Quote by R.L. LaFevers

#45. The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly. #Quote by Mary McCarthy

#46. Frivolous sorrow is folly. Frivolous enjoyment is not. #Quote by Mason Cooley

#47. To stumble twice against the same stone is a Proverbsial disgrace. #Quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero

#48. You may attempt to defy me, but I assure you, it is a waste of your energy." He spoke gently, that mocking male superiority setting her teeth on edge. "I am your lifemate, cherie, and I will give any order I deem necessary for your safety."
She thumped his chest hard with her clenched fist. "You make me so mad, Gregori! I'm trying very hard to get along with you and your arrogant orders. You don't even change expression! We could be discussing the weather instead of having a fight."
His eyebrows shot up. "This is no fight, ma petite. A fight is where we both are angry and have a contest of wills,a battle.There cannot be such a thing between us.I do not feel anger when I look at you,only the need to care for you and protect you. I am responsible for your health and safety, Savannah. I can do no other than to protect you,even from your own folly.You cannot hope to win.I know this absolutely, so there is no reason to become agitated over the issue."
She thumped him again.He looked startled, then caught her flying fist in his hand and gently pried her fingers open.Very carefully he pressed a kiss into the exact center of her palm. "Savannah? Were you trying to hit me?"
"I did hit you-twice,you scum.You didn't even notice the first time." She sounded very irritated with him.
For some reason it made him want to smile. "I apologize,mon amour. Next time,I promise I will notice when you strike me." The hard edge to his mouth softened into a semblance of a smil #Quote by Christine Feehan

#49. It is folly to shiver over last year's snow. #Quote by Richard Whately