quotations about fools
Fine clothes may disguise, but silly words will disclose a fool.
AESOP
Aesop's Fables
Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"The Voyage to Vinland"
O! I am Fortune's fool.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Harper's magazine, Aug. 1990
The learned Fool writes his Nonsense in better Language than the unlearned; but still 'tis Nonsense.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1754
Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook F", Aphorisms
The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Bobok
There are two indiscretions that generally distinguish fools: a readiness to report whatever they hear, and a practice of communicating with secrecy what is commonly understood.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.
W.C. FIELDS
The angels must tremble when a fool is in the right.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
There may be no fool like an old fool, but our observation has been that the young fool runs him a pretty close second.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
Children and fools speak true.
JOHN LYLY
Endymion
He must be a thorough fool who can learn nothing from his own folly.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Too many men are afraid of being fools.
HENRY FORD
"In Bondage to a Reputation," Ford Ideals
Ten gods cannot change the opinion of one fool, especially if another fool agrees with him.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Fashion! -- a word which knaves and fools may use,
Their knavery and folly to excuse.
CHARLES CHURCHILL
The Rosciad
When a fool dies there is much shedding of tears in the land whither he is bound.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
When dunces call us fools, without proving us to be so, our best retort is to prove them to be fools, without condescending to call them so.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Because other people are fools, must you be so too?
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations