This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Much of the wisdom of one age is the folly of the next.
Wit gives to life one of its best flavors; common-sense leads to immediate action, and gives society its daily motion; large and comprehensive views, its annual rotation; ridicule chastises folly and imprudence, and keeps men in their proper sphere; subtlety seizes hold of the find threads of truth; analogy darts away in the most sublime discoveries; feeling paints all the exquisite passions of man’s soul, and rewards him by a thousand inward visitations for the sorrows that come from without.
Action | Folly | Life | Life | Man | Men | Ridicule | Sense | Society | Soul | Truth | Wisdom | Wit | Society |
What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster? To see rare effects, and no cause; a motion, without a mover; a circle, without a centre; a time, without an eternity; a second, without a first: these are things so against philosophy and natural reason, that he must be a beast in understanding who can believe in them. The thing formed, says that nothing formed it; and that which is made, is, while that which made it is not! This folly is infinite!
Art | Cause | Chance | Earth | Eternity | Folly | Heaven | Nothing | Philosophy | Reason | Skill | Time | Understanding | Wisdom | Art | Think |
Yves Congar, fully Yves Marie-Joseph Congar
Congreve, William Congreve - Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing and the overtaking and possessing of a wish, discovers the folly of the chase.
Expectation | Folly | Life | Life | Security | Uncertainty | Expectation |
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
Happiness – the joy of living – comes in the experience of gratitude that flows forma vision of one’s life as a reality received, a gift given freely and spontaneously. Such a vision removes self from the center, thus healing self-centeredness by revealing the folly of the illusion of control.
Control | Experience | Folly | Gratitude | Illusion | Joy | Life | Life | Reality | Self | Vision |
Experience: The wisdom that enables us to recognize in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Acquaintance | Experience | Folly | Wisdom | Old |
The folly of intelligent people, clear-headed and narrow-visioned, has precipitated many catastrophes.
He that sympathizes in all the happiness of others, perhaps himself enjoys the safest happiness; and he that is warned by the folly of others has perhaps attained the soundest wisdom.
Those who realize their folly are not true fools.
Folly |
It is great folly to wish only to be wise.
He who lives without committing any folly is not so wise as he thinks.
The folly of one man is the fortune of another. For no man prospers so suddenlyu a by others’ errors.
Two protecting deities, indeed, like two sober friends supporting a drunkard, flank human folly and keep it within bounds. One of these deities is Punishment and the other Agreement.
Folly | Punishment | Friends |
The ultimate result of shielding people from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.