William Shakespeare Quotes

There is only a finger's difference between a wise man and a fool.

Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.

Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable.

In the beginning the Gods made man, and fashioned the sky and the sea, And the earth's fair face for man's dwelling-place, and this was the Gods' decree: "Lo, We have given to man five wits: he discerneth folly and sin; He is swift to deride all the world outside, and blind to the world within: So that man may make sport and amuse Us, in battling for phrases or pelf, Now that each may know what forebodeth woe to his neighbor, and not to himself.

The foolish race of mankind are swarming below in the night; they shriek and rage and quarrel - and all of them are right.

Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation.

Covering discretion with a coat of folly.

Man is known to be a selfish, as well as a social being.

Quantum est in rebus inane! How much folly there is in human affairs.

To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast!

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey. I believe that whenever a human being, of even the highest intelligence and culture, delivers an opinion upon a matter apart from his particular and especial line of interest, training and experience, it will always be an opinion of so foolish and so valueless a sort that it can be depended upon to suggest to our Heavenly Father that the human being is another disappointment and that he is no considerable improvement upon the monkey.

Every man's follies are the caricature resemblances of his wisdom.

The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.

Socialist is not a human but animal - because human differs from animal in this that he has moral rules, and reds, as their program states, they disobey them.

When humans act like animals, they become the most dangerous of animals to themselves and other humans, and this is because of another critical difference between humans and animals: Whereas animals are usually restrained by the limits of physical appetites, humans have mental appetites that can be far more gross and capacious than physical ones. Only humans squander and hoard, murder and pillage because of notions.

Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

If you argue with a fool, someone passing by will not be able to tell who is the fool and who is not.

A man loses his illusions first, his teeth second, and his follies last.

Everything must not always be said, for that would be folly.

It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.

Such is the state of every age, every sex, and every condition: all have their cares, either from nature or from folly; and whoever, therefore, finds himself inclined to envy another, should remember that he knows not the real condition which he desires to obtain, but is certain that by indulging a vicious passion, he must lessen that happiness which he thinks already too sparingly bestowed.

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

But cool and candid people will at once reflect, that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them, that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness, involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused.