Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.
Democritus

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.
Desiderius Erasmus

Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.
Shelby Foote

One man's folly is another man's wife.
Helen Rowland

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.
Robert Peel

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Cyril Connolly

Some accidents there are in life that a little folly is necessary to help us out of.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.
Elizabeth Gaskell

The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.
Pliny the Elder

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

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.
Atom Egoyan

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Paul Valery

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

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.
William Blake

The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.
William Blake

The Lord had been very gracious, and spoke peace to me in the time of my distress, and I now most ungratefully turned again to folly; at times I felt sharp reproof, but I did not get low enough to cry for help.
John Woolman

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
E. O. Wilson

The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion, or delusion.
Derek Jarman

The principal axiom in their theory was: Everything can be proved, and everything can be disproved; and in the process, one must profit as much from the folly of others, and from his own superiority, as he can.
Moses Mendelssohn