O noble fool!
A worthy fool! Motley's the only wear.
I had rather have a fool to make me merry
than experience to make me sad: and to travel
for it too!
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
Fools are not mad folks.
Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in's own house.
Well, thus we play the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
A fool's bolt is soon shot.
The fool hath planted in his memory
An army of good words; and I do know
A many fools, that stand in better place,
Garnish'd like him, that for a tricksy word
Defy the matter.
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
To wisdom he's a fool that will not yield.
This fellow is wise enough to play the fool;
And to do that well craves a kind of wit.
Marry, sir, they praise me and make an ass
of me; now my foes tell me plainly I am an ass;
so that by my foes, sir, I profit in the knowledge
of myself.
I hold him but a fool that will endanger
His body for a girl that loves him not.
You may as well
Forbid the sea for to obey the moon
As or by oath remove or counsel shake
The fabric of his folly.
'Tis not by guilt the onward sweep
Of truth and right, O Lord, we stay;
'Tis by our follies that so long
We hold the earth from heaven away.
He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells, and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.
For take thy ballaunce if thou be so wise,
And weigh the winde that under heaven doth blow;
Or weigh the light that in the east doth rise;
Or weigh the thought that from man's mind doth flow.
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.
Chi conta i colpi e la dovuta offesa,
Mentr' arde la tenzon, misura e pesa?
A fool is he that comes to preach or prate,
When men with swords their right and wrong debate.
Le sot est comme le peuple, qui se croit riche depeu.
The fool is like those people who think themselves rich with little.
Qui se croit sage, 6 ciel! est un grand fou.
He who thinks himself wise, O heavens! is a great fool.
The greatest men
May ask a foolish question, now and then.
Be wise with speed;
A fool at forty is a fool indeed.
At thirty man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan.
To climb life's worn, heavy wheel
Which draws up nothing new.
Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.
We bleed, we tremble; we forget, we smile—
The mind turns fool, before the cheek is dry.
