All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.
Benjamin Franklin

As a child is indulged or checked in its early follies, a ground is generally laid for the happiness or misery of the future man.
Samuel Richardson

Every man has his follies - and often they are the most interesting thing he has got.
Josh Billings

Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?
Thomas Jefferson

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon

History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon

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.
Robert Bulwer-Lytton

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies - thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
David Herbert Lawrence

It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one.
Jerome K. Jerome

My dreams are all follies.
Taylor Caldwell

None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.
Morris West

O my God, what must a soul be like when it is in this state! It longs to be all one tongue with which to praise the Lord. It utters a thousand pious follies, in a continuous endeavor to please Him who thus possesses it.
Saint Teresa of Avila

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.
Moliere

The follies which a man regrets the most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.
Helen Rowland

The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.
Jonathan Swift

The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture.
Joseph Addison

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H. L. Mencken

The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture.
Ian Hamilton Finlay