#folly

Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly. ↗

— Jonathan Swift

#happy #humor #laughed #men #their

To be bowed by grief is folly; Naught is gained by melancholy; Better than the pain of thinking, Is to steep the sense in drinking. ↗

— Alcaeus

#bowed #drinking #folly #gained #grief

I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her spend less on makeup and other nonessentials, to make her worship every biological moment she was offered instead of some badly punctured deity. I also wanted to kiss her for some reason, feel the life pulsing in those big Catholic lips, remind myself of the primacy of the living animal, of my time amongst the Romans. ↗

— Gary Shteyngart

#religions #roman #change

Folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom. ↗

— Edith Wharton

#folly #wisdom #age

Can human folly harbour a more arrogant or ungrateful thought than the notion that whereas God makes man beautiful in body, man makes himself pure in heart? ↗

— Augustine of Hippo

#human-folly #purity #beauty

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness. ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#colonizer #danger #fear #folly #humanity

He who imagines he can do without the world deceives himself much; but he who fancies the world cannot do without him is still more mistaken. ↗

— François de La Rochefoucauld

#pride #imagination

Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet... ↗

— Stephen King

#folly #imagination #war #imagination

But I can tell you what your folly and injustice will compel us to do. It will compel us to be free from your domination, and more self-reliant than we have been. ↗

— John H. Reagan

#compel #domination #folly #free #i

Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. ↗

— Jane Austen

#blindness #denial #folly #love #refusal