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More "Folly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seemingly unlike parts, from the wide-spread effects of small conditions, from the utter dying out of races like the Tasmanians or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances different from those with which their ancestors were familiar. What folly to interfere with a marvellous instinct which now preserves this balance intact, in favour of an untried artificial system which would probably wreck it as helplessly as the modern system of higher education for women is wrecking ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... which gave us Hamlet, and Lear, Cordelia, and Puck, and all the rest, and indeed explaining to us how he could give us all these;—while we hardly go so far, we agree with his other wise words:—"There is a weakness and folly in all misplaced and excessive affection;" which in Shakspeare's case is the more distressing, when we consider that "Mr. W. H., the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets," was, in all likelihood, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... indifference a scene of such unjustifiable extravagance; it contributed to render her thoughtful and uneasy, and to deprive her of all mental power of participating in the gaiety of the assembly. Mr Arnott was yet more deeply affected by the mad folly of the scheme, and received from the whole evening no other satisfaction than that which a look of sympathetic concern from ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... words. Mme. de Sevigne found her admirable, and even the grave Pomponne begged his friend not to forget to send him all her witticisms. Of the agreeable but rather light Comtesse de Fiesque, she said: "What preserves her beauty is that it is salted in folly." Of James II of England, she remarked, "The Holy Spirit has eaten up his understanding." The saying that the eight generals appointed at the death of Turenne were "the small change for Turenne" has been attributed to her. It is certainly ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... bear a little with my folly; and indeed do bear with me. [11:2]For I am zealous for you with a godly zeal, for I joined you, a chaste virgin, to one husband, to present to Christ; [11:3]but I fear lest as the serpent deceived Eve with his craftiness, so also your minds may be ...
— The New Testament • Various
... for what might come next; and Miss Carlyle moved away also. Not more shivery was that wretched man than Lady Isabel, as she walked by her side. A sorry figure to cut, that, for her once chosen cavalier. What did she think of his beauty now? I know what she thought of her past folly. ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... a year squandered in idleness or in foolish pursuits means the sacrifice of all the advantages just mentioned. And any one who keeps up idleness or folly for a year, usually ends in having ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly; and from these taxes the commissioners can not ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement. However, let us hearken to good advice, and something may be done for us; 'God helps them that help ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... coarseness than his wife, upbraided Victorine for not striving for the rose with her sisters. "Were you but cured of your folly, child," he said, "there is no doubt of your success as Rosiere, for you are a great favourite, Victorine, notwithstanding ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... the staff of the great specialist, and resorted daily to the busy offices in the Athenian Building. A brief vacation had served to convince him of the folly that lay in indulging a parcel of incoherent prejudices at the expense of even that somewhat nebulous thing popularly called a "career." Dr. Lindsay made flattering offers; the work promised to be light, with sufficient opportunity for whatever hospital practice ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... mysterious terror which linked Hugh Guinness and Catharine together. It was there he would revenge himself. Some day he would put out his dead hand from the grave to work the child's destruction. She had reasoned and laughed at her own folly in the matter for years. But the belief was there. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its suppression. At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make some fluent generalities sound plausible. He knows that the investigation of savage life will throw some light upon the origins of government. He sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the state of nature. He insists, probably after conversation with Adam Smith, upon the social value of the division of functions. He does not doubt the original equality of men. He thinks the luxury of his age has reached the limit of its useful growth. Property he ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... shrouded By evening's paler ray, Smiles beauteous and unclouded Before the eye of day; So let our souls, benighted Too long in folly's shade, By the kind smiles be lighted To ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... in flower and the crickets at their concerts, a second wish often came to me. Along the road, I light upon a dead mole, a snake killed with a stone, victims both of human folly. The mole was draining the soil and purging it of its vermin. Finding him under his spade, the laborer broke his back for him and flung him over the hedge. The snake, roused from her slumber by the soft warmth ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... like this, but it is true; he would not have entered a village of Casembe or Moamba or Chikumbi as he did Chapi's man's village: the people here are simply men of more metal than he imagined, and his folly in beginning a war in which, if possible, his slaves will slip through his hands is apparent to all, even to himself. Syde sent four barrels of gunpowder and ten men, who ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... you, and I will no longer be the tool of an impostor," replied he, morosely. "Am I to be the laughing-stock of Vienna, while men of distinction see through the tricks of the charlatan? I must and will have the strength to confess my folly, and to admit ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the people of the Metropolis to elect me their legislatorial attorney, was, that he might be elected for Manchester at the ensuing meeting. On this proposition I at once put a negative, by referring to the Gazette, and to the proclamation, adding, that it would be worse than folly to run our heads against such a post; and I further declared, that I saw no good that was to be derived from such a measure. In this the committee at once concurred, and it was agreed, that every intention of that ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... can do no better with it than to pay off its debts; but to do this, when there was every prospect of a Mormon war to raise the expenditure, little prospect of retrenchment in any branch of service, and a daily diminishing revenue at all points,—it was purely a piece of folly, a want of ordinary forecast, to get rid of the cash in hand. Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Cobb were guilty of this folly, and, for the sake of the poor eclat of coming to the relief of the money-market, (which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... of that day had almost made Mrs. Ponsonby fear that there was nothing to understand, and that only dear Aunt Kitty's affection could perceive anything but amiable folly, and it was not much better when the young gentleman reappeared, looking very debonnaire, and, sitting down beside Mrs. Frost, said, in a voice meant for her alone—'Henry IV; Part II., the insult to ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... retreat, merely because a momentary resistance was offered by a party of Americans who had taken refuge in the log-barracks! The British troops reluctantly obeyed their general's order and returned to their boats, men and officers being acutely sensible to his folly, and wondering by what means so incompetent a commander had been placed over them. If Sir George Prevost had studied the history of the war of the American revolution, it could only have been with an eye to copy all the indecisions and blunders of the formalising, badly instructed ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... for the happiness of public or private life, our wit or folly have so refined; that they seldom subsist but in idea; a true friend, a good marriage, a perfect form of government, with some others, require so many ingredients, so good in their several kinds, and so much niceness in mixing them, that for some thousands of years men have despaired ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... consideration, he cannot make too much haste to perform it. "Be not rash with thy mouth," saith the preacher. That is, do not vow rashly, but, "When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it: for He hath no pleasure in fools (slow performance is folly); pay that which thou hast vowed." Speedy paying (like speedy giving) is double payment; whereas slow payment is no payment or as bad as none, for it is foolish payment. A bond, if I mistake not, is presently due in law, if no day be specified in the bond. It is so I am ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... of a proposal touches a girl's pride and may prove the entering-wedge of love; hence the proverbial folly of accepting a girl's first refusal as final. And if she accepts, the thought that she, the most perfect being in the world, prefers him above all men, inflates his pride to the point of exultation; thenceforth he can talk and think only in "three pil'd hyperboles." ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Fitch's boats had made trips in the Delaware only some twenty years earlier, the fact did not seem to be generally known. People had all along spoken of Fulton as a half-crazy dreamer and had called his boat "Fulton's Folly." "Of course, the thing will not move," said one scoffer. "That any man with common sense well knows," another replied. And yet they all stood watching for Fulton's signal ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... at Trooditissa no arrivals of despairing wives occurred, but in the exhausted conditions of the finance throughout the island, it would have been the height of folly to have desired an increase of family, and thereby multiply expenses; possibly the uncertainty respecting the permanence of the English occupation may deter the ladies, who may postpone their pilgrimage to the monastery until their offspring should be born with the rights ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... stand intact in their pristine beauty. May they never suffer the terrible fate of a very beautiful one which was erected in the fourteenth century at Bristol! Pope, writing a century and a half ago, describes it as "a very fine old cross of Gothic curious work, but spoiled with the folly of new gilding it, that takes away all ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... was starting for his home on the south side of the river. Occasionally some smart man came from St. James's Street to bury himself in his flat in Queen Anne's Mansions. A belated Tommy Atkins crossed the bridge to make for the St. James's Barracks. One or two of the daughters of folly went loungingly by—wandering, not altogether purposeless, among the open roads of the Park. None of all these had taken any notice of ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... folly here, Is wisdom in that favoured sphere; The wisdom we so highly prize Is blatant folly ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... than folly! To give up what you have worked for all these years—the men who worship ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... pleasantly and profitably spent. The stupendous church of St. Peter's, with its chapels and galleries, being in itself an imposing object lesson. Its glories have already been inadequately described by some of the most famous of literary men, and where they have failed it would be folly for a mere ball player to make the attempt. In St. Peter's we spent almost an entire day, and leaving it we felt that there was still more to be seen. The second day we visited the palace of the Caesars, ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... turmoil Of uproar and folly— That renders the smile Of creation unholy? If that which we love Is life's best assistant, The thought still must rove To the dear and the distant. Would, then, that I were 'Mid nature's wild grandeur— From this folly afar, As I wont was ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... died without knowing of its loss, without suspecting that the stone in the royal parure is but a sham and an imitation," replied the count. "It all came of the youth, the recklessness, the folly of the crown prince. Monsieur may have heard of his—his many ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... the conception which you have formed is a vain shadow, do not quarrel with me on that account, as the manner of women is when their first children are taken from them. For I have actually known some who were ready to bite me when I deprived them of a darling folly; they did not perceive that I acted from goodwill, not knowing that no god is the enemy of man—that was not within the range of their ideas; neither am I their enemy in all this, but it would be wrong for me to admit falsehood, or to stifle the truth. ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... women, and removed every trace of the ceremony, and all that was unusual or extravagant. She set the simplest of meals; she managed in some way, without a word, to give the worried squire the assurance that all the folly and waste and hurryment were over for ever; and that his life was to fall back into a calm, ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... comparison with what the heroes or senators of Rome performed; but, on the contrary, if it be once condemned, nothing can be found ill enough to compare it with; and people are in pain till they find out some extravagant expression to represent the folly on't. Only there is this difference, that as all are more forcibly inclined to ill than good, they are much apter to exceed in detraction than in praises. Have I not reason then to desire this from you; ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... circumstances of my parents, and desired to leave my paternal hearth, hankering after the halls of kings and of the great, and daily longing more and more to array myself in the gayest and most luxurious costume." Ingulphus lived to repent, and to be ashamed of his weakness and folly.] ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... can speak truth if you will. We boast ourselves as even better men than our fathers; we took seven-gated Thebes, though the wall was stronger and our men were fewer in number, for we trusted in the omens of the gods and in the help of Jove, whereas they perished through their own sheer folly; hold not, then, our fathers ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... Gordon, that it is no part of my purpose to keep him as he is. It is my duty to save him from the consequences of his folly and of his perverted view of his relations with the world—to make him ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... [Footnote A: To the folly of intoxication he added the horrors of debt, and was so hunted by the sheriffs' officers that he usually walked the streets with a sword (sheathed) in his hand; and if he saw any of them at a distance, he would roar out, ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... the wealth of the land. It was not likely they would speedily depart; but if they did, it would only be to return again, in far greater force than at present. Other opportunities would occur for rejoining them, and it would be folly to throw away his life, and that of his companion, in an attempt that the latter evidently felt to be desperate. He had already had proof of the vigilance of the Aztec scouts, and doubtless that vigilance ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... saying, his mighty spear, with all his force, Full at the flank against the ribs he drave, And pierced the bellying framework of the horse. Quivering, it stood; the hollow chambers gave A groan, that echoed from the womb's dark cave, Then, but for folly or Fate's adverse power, His word had made us with our trusty glaive Lay bare the Argive ambush, and this hour Should Ilion stand, and thou, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... of bloodless murders! Without affirming such horrors of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, it would not be libellous to say that his fancy was tampering with future possibilities, as it constantly happens with those who are getting themselves into training for some act of folly, or some crime, it may be, which will in its own time evolve itself as an idea in the consciousness, and by and by ripen ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... significance of her folly came to her. She had driven a team of dogs worth at least a thousand dollars to oblivion. Their chief means of travel was gone, and hundreds of miles lay between them and civilization. How could she confess the loss to Jim? What ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... Shakespeare's spirit, with transporting fire, The animated scene throughout inspire; If in the piercing wit of Vanbrugh drest, Each sees his darling folly made a jest; If Garth's and Dryden's genius, through each line, In artful praise and well-turn'd satire shine,— To us ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... induced to lend small sums to his interested companions. After such sprays, as he called them, were over, and his temper once more cool, he seldom failed to thank God, and the Duke of York, who had made it much more difficult for an old soldier to ruin himself by his folly, than had been the case ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... in the latter a sponge, toady, or swindler. Nor has the colonist to consider how the making of chance acquaintances may affect his own social standing. In his own small world his social standing is a settled thing, and cannot be injured otherwise than by his own folly or misconduct. Moreover, most of the Islanders are, or have been, brought face to face with the solitude of nature, and many of all classes have travelled. These things make them more sociable, self-confident, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... wonderful invention. The old lady's tongue was caustic, and her language eloquent, and this occasion was not one to be lost. For a truly bad quarter of an hour she instilled into poor Britt a sense of his folly and faults, and finally demanded his services ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... has to go to the dominions of Yama and suffering great misery there, he has to take birth in an intermediate order of being,[509] Listen to me as I tell thee what the different acts are by doing which the diva, stupefied by folly, has to take birth in different orders of being, as declared in the Vedas, the scriptures, and the (sacred) histories. Mortals have to go to the frightful regions of Yama. In those regions, O king, there are places that are fraught with every merit and that are worthy on that account ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... failure of "self-government" in ancient America the most general and comprehensive was, of course, the impracticable nature of the system itself. In the light of modern culture, and instructed by history, we readily discern the folly of those crude ideas upon which the ancient Americans based what they knew as "republican institutions," and maintained, as long as maintenance was possible, with something of a religious fervor, even when the results were visibly disastrous. To us of to-day it is clear that the word "self-government" ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... humour, and chase away misfortune from our cottage with a smile. At a father's command, I could almost submit to what every female heart knows to be the most mortifying, to marry a weak man, and blush at my husband's folly in every company I visited. But to marry a depraved wretch, whose only virtue is a polished exterior; [who is actuated by the unmanly ambition of conquering the defenceless; whose heart, insensible to the emotions of patriotism, ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... upon the great theatre of life; and he sincerely believes that his only motive was to do good. He cast about to find the method of writing calculated to do the most general good. He wanted to whip vice and folly out of the country; he thought of 'Hudibras' and 'McFingal,' and pondered well whether he should attempt the masterly style of those writings. He found this would not do, for, like most modern rhymers, he is no poet, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... Seraphina - ' He hesitated at the name, and Gotthold glanced aside. 'Well,' the Prince continued, 'what has come of it? Taxes, army, cannon - why, it's like a box of lead soldiers! And the people sick at the folly of it, and fired with the injustice! And war, too - I hear of war - war in this teapot! What a complication of absurdity and disgrace! And when the inevitable end arrives - the revolution - who will be to blame in the sight of God, who will be gibbeted in ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... start of surprise, apparently not mixed with pleasure, at seeing Lemuel. She had never been able to share her husband's interest in him, while insisting upon his responsibility; she disliked him not logically, but naturally, for the wrong and folly which he had been the means of her husband's involving himself in; Miss Vane's kindliness toward Lemuel, which still survived, and which expressed itself in questions about him whenever she met the minister, was something that Mrs. Sewell could ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... Laura was a fool—nobody claims for her that she was not; but fools are not rare, either male or female; as they arrange the world and its ways in great measure, it is odd that they do not understand one another better, and whether Laura showed her folly most or least in thinking that she could have been obscurely happy as the wife of a man who belonged to a different class of life from her own (she herself having small intellectual endowments, and but little ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... ever," said Algitha, "until a few dare to break through the tradition, and then everyone will wonder at its folly. If only I could talk the matter over, in a friendly spirit, with mother, but she won't let me. Ah! if it were not that one is born with feelings and energies and ambitions of one's own, parents might treat ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... object of his hatred. He had made himself believe that all women were alike. Was there, then, only one kind of woman in a world filled with many kinds of men? Because he had been a fool, because he had been deceived by one woman, he had concluded, in his folly, that every woman was a vampire or a parasite,—"a rag and a bone and a ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... giving you better habits, and rousing the slumbering powers of your own constitution. As to deception, you have none to complain of, except what proceeded from your own foolish imagination, which persuaded you that a physician was to regulate his conduct by the folly and intemperance of his patient. As to all the rest, he only promised to exert all the secrets of his art for your cure; and this, I am witness he has done so effectually, that, were you to reward him with half your fortune, it would hardly be ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... country to die in the defence of Ghent. You came hither to do, if occasion offers, some knightly deeds, and feeling pity for the starving people here you offer them knightly aid, and will fight for them as long as there is a chance that fighting may avail them, but beyond that it would be folly indeed to go; and when you see the day hopelessly lost, you and your men-at-arms may well try to make your way out of the crowd of combatants, and to ride whither you will. I say not to return here, for that would indeed ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... to him—that of presenting himself at M. Dambreuse's house and applying for the post of secretary. This post, it was perfectly certain, could not be obtained without purchasing a certain number of shares. He recognised the folly of his project, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... her. She knew, with absolute certainty, that Dr. Angus had gauged her fatal habit of conceited anxiety to help other people when he cabled to her not to marry a drunkard whom she had merely put to him as a hypothetical case. And she knew the doctor was inevitably right about the folly of marrying ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... by the sarcastic method that Swift exposed the unreasonableness of loving and having children. In Gulliver, the folly of love and marriage is urged by graver arguments and advice. In the famous Lilliputian kingdom, Swift speaks with approval of the practice of instantly removing children from their parents and educating them by the State; and amongst his favourite horses, a pair of foals are stated ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... inculcate the idea that a change in conditions means the acquisition of unqualified bliss, and they assume that the poor are necessarily unhappy and endeavor to convince them—not a difficult task, that it is the fault of someone else that they are not rich! Folly! The hod-carrier and helot who works from dawn to dusk, who goes in rags, who fares on coarsest food, whose wife and children live in squalor, may be considered unhappy, but they never experience real suffering, acute, unasuageable, poignant grief, until they become possessed ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... distinction between my own children and the children of Pandu. My own sons were prone to wilfulness and despised me because I am old. Blind as I am, because of my miserable plight and through paternal affection, I bore it all. I was foolish after the thoughtless Duryodhana ever growing in folly. Having been a spectator of the riches of the mighty sons of Pandu, my son was derided for his awkwardness while ascending the hall. Unable to bear it all and unable himself to overcome the sons of Pandu in the field, and though a soldier, unwilling yet to obtain ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... gossip about his secret engagement, and possibly approaching marriage, should be spread abroad prematurely; and that the report might either frighten Madame Hanska into dismissing him altogether, or might reach the ears of her relations, and cause them to remonstrate with her anew on the folly of her proceedings. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... did strive that I look all-ways, lest any harm did come upon us, and in the same moment to reason Mine Own from her pretty folly, she did grow very husht, so that I lookt round upon her in an instant. And truly, she had cut the strap with her belt-knife, and did run away very swift among the trees. And surely my heart did slow a little in my breast, because that there did seem ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... not a few doubters. Efforts to educate the deaf were even declared quixotic and absurd. When the state of Illinois was erecting a building to be used as a school, it was by some called "the state's folly."[194] The legislatures themselves occasionally had misgivings, and now and then an appropriation was voted for a school more in hope than otherwise.[195] The work was thus with many often misunderstood, and a few of the schools did not have ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... from more than one quarter, that Violante might cease to be an heiress if she married himself. "But perhaps," suggests some candid and youthful conjecturer,—"perhaps Randal Leslie is in love with this fair creature?" Randal in love!—no! He was too absorbed by harder passions for that blissful folly. Nor, if he could have fallen in love, was Violante the one to attract that sullen, secret heart; her instinctive nobleness, the very stateliness of her beauty, womanlike though it was, awed him. Men of that kind may love some soft slave,—they cannot ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... surely at random. The Lady Edith Vernon is but a child; a very beautiful child," he added reverently, "and such that when she grows up, the bravest knight in England might be proud to win. What folly for me, the son of a city bowyer, and as yet but an apprentice, to raise mine ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... Old Costobarus is not so mired in folly as to send his daughter into the Pit to provide you with money ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... Act was passed in the British Parliament, on the news reaching Boston the bells were muffled, and rang a funeral peal. In New York the "Act" was carried through the streets with a death's head bearing this inscription: "The Folly of England and the Ruin of America." So great was the opposition to the "Act," that it was repealed during the spring of 1766. This shows how quickly the evils of society can be put down if people set to ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... Solomon's folly.—Alas for the happiness of the people, Solomon was a different kind of a man from his father. Like so many other sons of good kings he was spoiled by too much luxury and too little discipline. He had the reputation of ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... As his immediate concern was to escape the consequences of his folly in shooting a fellow mortal, he assured her that he was always glad of an opportunity to fling business cares aside. She explained that the inn was much affected by cottagers in neighboring summer settlements and that many of the ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... which Goneril dismisses with such scorn is indeed the text, or it will be, when the word which her commentary on it contains has been added to it: for it is 'the foolishness' of struggling with great Nature, and her LAW of KINDS—it is the folly of ignorance, the stupidity of living without respect to nature and its sequent effects, as ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... is folly, sheer folly. How could she look like Mrs. Urquhart? Imagination carries me too far. Equal innocence and a like gentle temper have produced a like result in sweetening the expression. That is all, and yet I remember the one woman when I look at the other, and shudder; for the woman who calls this ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... Where faint the fledge-foot seraphin, Blest Fool! Be ensign of our wars, And shame us all to warriors! Unbanner your bright locks,—advance Girl, their gilded puissance, I' the mystic vaward, and draw on After the lovely gonfalon Us to out-folly the excess Of your sweet foolhardiness; To adventure like ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... soon over, and our bird again started on its journey. But just then a hungry hawk, who had watched it for a long time, pounced upon it. Fortunately, the fairy, who was near, seeing the bird was sufficiently punished for its folly, took compassion on it, changed it into a squirrel again, and placed it safely in its own tree. The squirrel was ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston
... but still the common principles of sympathy would force even Sir John's philosophy to yield to the animating throng of people and carriages down St. James's Street, and follow their example all the time he was abusing their folly. ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... preconceived plan or were they, after all, playing with the fires of spring? He recalled several of Miss Pelham's socialistic remarks concerning the privileges of the "upper ten," the intolerance of caste and the snobbish morality which attaches folly to none but the girl who "works for ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... more melancholy disgrace for a creature who professes either reason or pleasure for his guide, than to spend the smallest fraction of his income upon that which he does not desire; and to keep a carriage in which you do not wish to drive, or a butler of whom you are afraid, is a pathetic kind of folly. Money, being a means of happiness, should make both parties happy when it changes hands; rightly disposed, it should be twice blessed in its employment; and buyer and seller should alike have their twenty shillings' worth of profit out of every pound. Benjamin ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... foretells the truth. Or if some erring crossbow-bolt should break Thine unarmed head, shot from behind a house, So, evil falls, and a fool foretells the truth." "Well," quoth Lord Raoul, with languid utterance, "'Tis very well — and thou'rt a foolish fool, Nay, thou art Folly's perfect witless man, Stupidity doth madly dote on thee, And Idiocy doth fight her for thy love, Yet Silliness doth love thee best of all, And while they quarrel, snatcheth thee to her And saith 'Ah! 'tis my sweetest No-brains: ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... imitation. Knowing the somewhat excessive degree of adulation which some sections of the British public are disposed to pay to their special idol, Lord Dufferin, in 1883, was almost apologetic to his countrymen for abstaining from an act of political folly. He pleaded strenuously for delay in the introduction of parliamentary institutions into Egypt, on the ground that our attempts "to mitigate predominant absolutism" in India had been slow, hesitating, and tentative. He brought poetic metaphor to ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... "It's all folly," she went on, "I don't believe it. Good heavens, what is that?" she added, as a footstep crunched in the hall-way. "You've got me all unstrung, you and ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... nobody had he such complete ascendance as Mrs Quilp herself—a pretty little, mild-spoken, blue-eyed woman, who having allied herself in wedlock to the dwarf in one of those strange infatuations of which examples are by no means scarce, performed a sound practical penance for her folly, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... if you would leave us alone and let us fight." Then the king says: "So help me God, all that thou sayest is of no avail." "Why is that?" he asks. "Because I will not consent. I will not so trust in thy folly and pride as to allow thee to be killed. A man is a fool to court death, as thou dost in thy ignorance. I know well that thou hatest me because I wish to save thy life. God will not let me see and witness thy death, if I can help ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... it? Amn't I after saying it is himself has me destroyed, and he a liar on walls, a talker of folly, a man you'd see stretched the half of the day in the brown ferns with his ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... to answer this handsome and cunning fool according to his folly, in what position should I find myself? No doubt my reply would induce a rejoinder, and that compel another note from me, and that invite yet another from him; and however his might improve in warmth, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... ancient nations, even in their primitive condition, saw the folly of this, and when one wished either to be inspired with the thoughts of others or to be himself a diviner of the thoughts of others, fasting was necessary, and a people from whom I think a great many ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... he was ready to execrate his folly for not having retraced his steps along the ledge and made good his escape by way of the mouth of the cavern, instead of continuing his journey, as he had done; for his ill-judged action had resulted in placing him at the wrong end of the cavern, and, to escape, he would be obliged ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... must be nothing better than a vast frippery shop, an ever-varying galantee show, an eternal vanity fair, a vortex of folly, a pandemonium of vice. ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... touch the hem of my garment." He meant, when he was to be transformed into one of their deities, and that God and he should be mixed into one divinity, which is the reward of a Bonza after death. Though the king could not hear his madness without smiling, yet he had so much compassion on his folly, that he took upon him to confute those extravagant propositions; but Xavier desired him to defer it to a fitter time, till he had digested his fury, and was more capable of hearing reason. Then the king said only to Faxiondono, "That he should go and do penance for the pride and ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... who aim at gentility gradually fall into the same practice. The influence of this custom extends across the ocean, and here, in this democratic land, we find many who measure their grade of gentility by the late hour at which they arrive at a party. And this aristocratic folly is growing upon us, so that, throughout the nation, the hours for visiting and retiring are constantly becoming later, while the hours for ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... most of the natives with them: but they first wanted to give us 4 Hogs. These we refused to except of them, as they would take nothing in return. Thus we are likely to leave these people in disgust with our behaviour towards them, owing wholy to the folly of 2 of our men, for it does not appear that the natives had any hand in inticing them away, and therefore were not the first Agressors. However, it is very certain that had we not taken this step we never should ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... thence home to dinner, staying till past one o'clock for Harris, whom I invited, and to bring Shadwell the poet with him; but they came not, and so a good dinner lost through my own folly. And so to dinner alone, having since church heard the boy read over Dryden's Reply to Sir R. Howard's Answer about his Essay of Poesy, and a Letter in answer to that; the last whereof is mighty silly, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... 'Womanly weakness! unmanly folly!' you say, some one who has never felt keenly and suddenly the pangs of such a passion unrequited. Perhaps so. But out of our great weakness sometimes grows our strength; out of our bitterest disappointments ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... What thought of folly Ravidus (poor churl!) Upon my iambs thus would headlong hurl? What good or cunning counsellor would fain Urge thee to struggle in such strife insane? Is't that the vulgar mouth thy name by rote? 5 What will'st thou? Wishest on ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... forgive me, were I not to show thee the fields which he taketh delight to cultivate after the newest and best fashion; for which, I promise thee, he hath received much praise from good judges, as well as some ridicule from those who think it folly to improve on the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... in the ordinary affairs of life we are governed far more by what we believe than by what we know; by FAITH and ANALOGY, than by REASON. The "Age of Reason" of the French Revolution taught, we know, what a folly it is to enthrone Reason by itself as supreme. Reason is at fault when it deals with the Infinite. There we must revere and believe. Notwithstanding the calamities of the virtuous, the miseries of the deserving, the prosperity of tyrants and the murder of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... closer scrutiny than it has received. At present people are beginning to realize that it is folly for the great English-speaking Republic to rely for defence upon a navy composed partly of antiquated hulks, and partly of new vessels rather more worthless than the old. It is worth while to study with some care that period of our history during which our ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... wise-men's folly fall'n] Sir Thomas Hammer reads, folly shewn. [The sense is, But wise men's folly, when it is once fallen into extravagance, overpowers their discretion. Revisal.] I explain it thus. The folly which he shows with proper adaptation ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... astonishment was felt at this ruthless destruction of all who bore one name. Still nobody suspected the true culprits, search was fruitless, inquiries led nowhere: the marquise put on mourning for her brothers, Sainte-Croix continued in his path of folly, and all things went on as before. Meanwhile Sainte-Croix had made the acquaintance of the Sieur de Saint Laurent, the same man from whom Penautier had asked for a post without success, and had made friends with him. Penautier had meanwhile become the heir of his father-in-law, the Sieur Lesecq, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... of the Skie shall sing My chereful Anthems to the gladsome Spring; A Pray'r book now shall be my looking glasse, In which I will adore sweet vertues face. Here dwell no hateful locks, no Pallace cares, No broken vows dwell here, nor pale fac'd fears, Then here I'l sit and sigh my hot loves folly, And learn t'affect an holy melancholy. And if contentment be a stranger, then I'l nere look for it, ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... did not exceed forty miles, made some impression upon them, which was increased upon our finding some bear-berry plants (arbutus uva ursi,) which are reported by the Indians not to grow to the eastward of that river. They then deplored their folly and impatience in breaking the canoe, being all of opinion, that had it not been so completely demolished on the 23d, it might have been repaired sufficiently to take the party over. We again closely interrogated Peltier and Vaillant as to its state, with the intention of sending for it; but they ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... with his small hazel eyes, but the young man showed no feeling, and Braybrooke began to think that really perhaps he had made a mountain out of a molehill, that he had done Adela Sellingworth an injustice. If she had really been inclined to any folly about his young friend she would certainly not have left London ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... the limitations of Milton. They are those of a man who lived in the time of a great national struggle, deliberately chose his own side in it, and from thenceforth saw nothing in the other but folly, obstinacy and crime. He has in him nothing whatever of the universal, and universally sympathetic, insight of Shakspeare. And he has paid the price of his narrowness in the open dislike, or at best grudging recognition, of that half of the world which ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... put it on his head, and then, without thinking, wished himself back in the ship that was starting for Famagosta. In a second he was standing at the prow, while the anchor was being weighed, and while the Sultan was repenting of his folly in allowing Fortunatus to try on the cap, the vessel ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... to see you again. I should have done better to stay in exile all my days. But exile without means of subsistence would be madness; I will not add another folly to the rest. Death is better than a maimed life; I cannot think of myself in any position in which my overweening vanity would not ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... to avoid this awful subject. Preachers of the Gospel do not speak of it in the pulpit as they once did. It is considered too shocking for our modern notions. I have no patience with such weakness, such folly—worse than folly. It seems to me even more wrong to try and hide this terrible danger from ourselves and from others than to deny it altogether, as some poor deluded souls do. Mr. Lyndsay, have you ever realised what the place of ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... in me, Esther?" he asked her gently. Suddenly she seemed to him most pathetic in her wilful folly. She had always been, she would always be, he knew, a creature who ruled through her weakness, found it an asset, traded on it perhaps, and whereas once this had seemed to him enchanting, now, in the face of ill-fortune it ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... mythology at some length, but it is only a small part of what they have upon the subject. My first feeling on reading it was that any amount of folly on the part of the unborn in coming here was justified by a desire to escape from such intolerable prosing. The mythology is obviously an unfair and exaggerated representation of life and things; and had its authors ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... name and broke in with a question. A volley of talk between the two was enlivened with expressive gestures by Taung S'Ali, who several times pointed to Iris, and Jenks now anathematized his thoughtless folly in permitting the Dyak to approach so near. The Mahommedan, of course, had never seen her, and might have persuaded the other that in truth there were two men only on ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... as Josiah Christmas, merchant of Bristol city, and his maternal uncle, walked into the office, whither the lad followed slowly, looking stubborn and ill-used, for Mike Bannock's poison was at work, and in his youthful ignorance and folly, he felt too angry to ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... hard and vainly endeavored to recapture the mood in which he had interpreted the Ballade, and then he fell to laughing at his spleen. A great artist to be annoyed by the first adverse feather that happened to tickle him in an awkward way. What folly! What vanity! Mychowski laughed and ordered a big glass of ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... objects, this high correlation between parent and child does not prove inheritance,—it obviously proves infection. The family relations are so intimate that it is folly to overlook this factor in ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... weigh carefully things which, as they appeared to him, were on the face insignificant. This had led him into strange trends of thought, had encouraged, in a way, superstitious fancies not altogether good for him. He knew that, and he had cursed his folly, and yet on this morning after the storm, on the after-deck of a throbbing tugboat he nodded his head sharply, outward acquiescence to an inward conviction that somehow, somewhere, he was going to see that face again and hear ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... the antiquary, "although she is an excellent woman, has the defect of allowing herself to be shocked by any little act of folly. In these provincial towns, my dear friend, the slightest slip is dearly paid for. I see nothing particular in your having gone to the Troyas' house. I fancy that Don Inocencio, under his cloak of piety, is something of a ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... example, &c., &c. I, of course, took such observations at their true value; I knew Short and Kosinski too well to give two thoughts to the matter. Still when, on top of all this mysterious talk, I received Giannoli's letter, in which he spoke of his folly in trusting his supposed friend, and accused him of being neither more nor less than an agent in the hands of the International police, I felt my brain whirl, and really wondered whether I was the sole sane person in a mad world, or whether the ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... heresies in the world would instantly disappear. If they would use their own eyes, their own ears, their own understandings, instead of the eyes, and ears, and understandings of others, imbecility, credulity and folly would be as rare as they are now common in community. But, unhappily, to borrow the words of Ganganelli, a large majority of mankind are 'mere abortions:' calling themselves rational and intelligent beings, they act as if they had neither brains nor conscience, and as if there ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... partnership with Fletcher, a possible interpolation by Jonson; but in the descent from these to the alleged adulteration of the text by Middleton and Rowley we have surely sounded the very lowest depth of folly attainable by the utmost alacrity in sinking which may yet be possible to the bastard brood of Scriblerus. For my part, I shall not be surprised though the next discoverer should assure us that half at least of Hamlet is evidently due to the collaboration of Heywood, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... which a general improvement among the people would necessarily have on the manner of their being governed.—The people arrived, in this age, at a state which renders it impracticable to preserve national tranquillity without improving their minds and making some concession to their claims.—Folly and probable calamity of an obstinate resolution to maintain subordination in the nations of Europe in the arbitrary and despotic manner of former times.—Facility and certain success of a ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... lordship that the rejuvenated car would arrive at the College Green Hotel, Bristol, on Friday evening. At the very moment that he realized the imminence of Cynthia's disappearance into the void it was doubly disconcerting to be hailed by a woman who knew his world so intimately that it would be folly to smile vacantly at ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... guarantee to the islands order at home and protection from foreign invasion. But no one can prophesy the exact date when it will be wise to consider independence as a fixed and definite policy. It would be worse than folly to try to set down such a date in advance, for it must depend upon the way in which the Philippine people themselves develop the power ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... see Kay once more came over her. There had been a time when she thought she loved Cliff; then Kay had come into her life, and she had known that other affair was folly. She had never told Kay of the bitter scene between Cliff and herself, how he had raved against Kay and sworn to win ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... scholar is willing to learn, He with silent submission should hear; Too late they their folly discern, The effect to this day ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... fault really lie in the folly—I may almost say sin,—of demanding of men to believe so many things that neither reason nor enlightened moral sense can accept, and making of these dogmas five-barred gates through which alone there ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... you are here increases your danger, and if my absence should become known, there will be a search after me. I shall never forgive myself if my folly should lead to your ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... The Odes have it, "To prevent the monkey from climbing a tree is like putting mud on a man in the mire." For a person to adopt such methods while engaged in the making of a dynasty is the height of folly. Mencius says, "a Chuntse when creating a dynasty aims at things that can be handed down as good examples." Is it not the greatest misfortune to set up an example that cannot be handed down as a precedent? The present state of affairs is causing me ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... enemy to fear in my whole dominions. And from the impossibility, as I supposed, of there being any, or of the ingress of any, unless by the same passage I entered at, and by which I was well assured they could never return, I grew contented, and blamed myself for the folly of my imaginary voices, as I called them then, and took it for a ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... of weak and wicked clinging to the phantoms of my youth; must believe that I do not harbor a regret or wish incompatible with my duty as his wife. I will avail myself of the first favorable moment to assure him of the folly of his fears and of ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... holding out an arm, as though by the gesture swearing to his own transgression: "I counted myself a good man, and I'll not say now but I did more for"—some name died upon his lips—"than one man in a hundred would have done; but in my folly I angered her, and when I'd have given my life ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... fast as they could toward Thomas, elated at their success. They swam the creek again, but at another point. Carpenter told them that the Southern army would cross it on a bridge, and Markham lamented that he could not turn and destroy this bridge, but such an attempt would have been folly. ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... hated such arguments, despised this rodomontade about love, and would have crushed the girl into obedience could it have been possible. "You are an idiot," she said, "an ungrateful idiot; and unless you think better of it you'll repent your folly to your dying day. Who do you think is to come running after a moping slut like you?" Then Mary gathered herself up and left the room, feeling that she could not live in the house if she were to be ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... my own intolerable folly, Hugh. I hope this is the last time that I shall yield to such storms of passion. I have much to ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... consequence of this lamentable occurrence was the removal of the seat of government from Montreal. The Administration felt that, in view of what had taken place, it would be folly to expose the Government and parliament to a repetition of these outrages. This resolve gave rise to innumerable jealousies on the part of the several cities which aspired to the honour of having the legislature ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... some renown, principally derived from a voyage of destruction against the Spaniards in 1592; but he was a vain and affected character, little calculated for decisive and manly action. Instructions were prepared, but the King, with his accustomed profundity of folly, directed that they should be sealed in a box, and not opened until the voyagers arrived upon the coasts of Virginia. In the vessels there embarked, beyond the regular crews, one hundred five persons, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... examination would be null or formal having had at once the effect of greatly increasing travel. And as there is not a custom-house in all Europe where a man who knows the trick cannot pull through his luggage by bribery—the exceptions being miraculously rare—the absurdity and folly ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... had stopped. How like America! The only recorded instance, he would explain to Irene, of an export from that country being required—the commodity proved inadequate. No, that would make Irene cry. . . . The folly of hopeless, futile thoughts jingled on. Suddenly he heard the cry of a belated newsvendor, howling some British victory, some horrible scandal in Paris. Scandal, exposure, publicity—there was the horror. He could almost hear the journalists ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... had to stow the one cannon below to prevent capsizing when they ventured out of harbor. These craft were a pet notion of Jefferson. "Believing, myself," he said of them, "that gunboats are the only water defense which can be useful to us and protect us from the ruinous folly of a navy, I am pleased with everything which ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... chant the praises of Buddha, bidding the gentle spirit "Pass on! Pass on!" and boldly speed through the labyrinth before it, "through high, deep, and famous things, through good and evil things, through truth and error, through wisdom and folly, through sorrow, suffering, hope, life, joy, love, death, through endless ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... and he loved his only child closely and well. Then he roughly chid the little girl for idling there whilst her mother needed her within, and sent her indoors crying and afraid: then, turning, he snatched the wood from Nello's hands. "Dost do much of such folly?" he asked, but there was a tremble ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... foresworn, And gilded honor shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill, And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill: Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a weak moment he had felt that flagging of confidence—when Mary had left his house, but he had swiftly conquered it. He would as summarily conquer its repetition. His nerves were not such uncontrolled agents as to be shaken by the wild folly and accidents that grew out of weaker natures. All battlefields leave black scars and pictures which are not pretty pictures. To pause and surrender to brooding over these details is to clip one's wings and dull one's talons. He ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the money? Bab sighed heavily. She had been so happy and so interested in Washington, and now Mollie's ill-advised purchase had changed everything. For a moment Barbara felt a little resentment toward Mollie, then she shook off the feeling as unworthy. Mollie had experienced bitter remorse for her folly, and Bab knew that her little sister had learned a lesson she would never forget. As for the money, it should be paid ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... swiftly the weasel followed, hungry, bloodthirsty, relentless on the trail. Terrified into folly by the suddenness and deadliness of this peril, the squirrel ran too far up the tree and was almost cornered. Where the branches were small there was no chance to swing to another tree. Perceiving this mistake, he gave a squeak of terror, then bounded ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... healing sense of peace that came to him when Valerius rode closer and put his arm around his shoulder. "Diogenes," he said, "your flame is still bright. I could wish you had not fallen in love with another man's wife, and if he were still living I should try to convince you of the folly of it. But I know this hot heart of yours is as pure as the snow we see on the Alps in midsummer. That is all I need to know." And they had ridden on in the darkness ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... for the festival which is got up for the Emperor, not by an individual, but by the citizens as a body. We could not accept alone, but it is folly to refuse what a rich municipality offers. That is neither more nor less than making them ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and civilization admit of as many causes of wars as poverty and barbarism, since the folly and wickedness of men are incurable, there remains but one good action to be done. The wise man will collect enough dynamite to blow up this planet. When its fragments fly through space an imperceptible ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... understood, at the outset, that every proved theory of science is to be accepted. Only the most intense prejudice and the maddest folly would lead any one to reject the proved conclusions of science. Moreover, we should examine any new hypothesis with open minds, to see if it has in it anything truthful, helpful or advantageous. It should neither be accepted nor rejected simply because it is new. But if a theory is evidently or ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... mounted on so ungovernable a Hobby; leaping the barriers, in spite of his best resolutions. Perhaps the poetic temperament is more liable to such morbid biases, influxes of imaginative crotchet, and mere folly that cannot be cured? Friedrich Wilhelm never would or could dismount from his Hobby: but he rode him under much sorrow henceforth; under showers of anger and ridicule;—contumelious words and procedures, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... my lord, I pray thee, regard this man of Belial, even Nabal: for as his name is, so is he; Nabal is his name, and folly is with him: but I thine handmaid saw not the young men of my ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... ordinary Infamy and Punishment, for offending against such quick Admonitions as their own Souls give them, and blunting the fine Edge of their Minds in such a Manner, that they are no more shock'd at Vice and Folly, than Men of slower Capacities. There is no greater Monster in Being, than a very ill Man of great Parts: He lives like a Man in a Palsy, with one Side of him dead. While perhaps he enjoys the Satisfaction of Luxury, of Wealth, of Ambition, he has lost the Taste of Good-will, of Friendship, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... persons to moot the proposition that war was incompatible with Christianity; I was regarded as an arrant fanatic. The idea that we could get on without war was regarded as unmitigated weakness and folly." ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... although I entered this inn, as they have doubtless told you, in the dress of a man, I am an unhappy maiden, or at least I was one not eight days ago, and ceased to be so, because I had the folly to believe the delusive words of a perjured man. My name is Teodosia; my birth-place is one of the chief towns of the province of Andalusia, the name of which I suppress, because it does not import you so much to know it as me to conceal it. My parents, who are noble and wealthy, had ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... not be there! Old Costobarus is not so mired in folly as to send his daughter into the Pit to provide ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... story is true I know from others. Scribe, you have done well. But for you to-day his Highness would lie upon the table of the embalmers, as indeed for his folly he deserves to do, and Egypt would mourn from Thebes to the mouths of Nile. ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... since, in spite of my reason and of all that I have said against it. I do not withdraw anything that I have already said; but when I see the inveterate persistency of foreign writers to try and prove that the French Revolution was one long story of folly and shame, and that it is but an unimportant factor in the world's history, I begin to think that it is perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, inasmuch as other people are so ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... the sin And the folly around, 'Tis a much better place Than the fore-fathers found; And in spite of the fools And the devils that grieve I'm sure in no hurry ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... a Jilla-Jilly wind, it's almost as bad," thought our hero. If he had known more about the ocean and its terrors he would have been more frightened than he was. If it was not exactly an instance of "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," it was, in Bob's case, ...
— Bob the Castaway • Frank V. Webster
... "I must die! It was folly in me to crawl up here. The mud and the water were good enough for my brothers, and good enough for me too, had I only known it; and now I am too weak, and feel too strangely, to attempt going down again the ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... my boy," said his father sternly. "Recollect that you are a Mackhai. Let this legal robber take all; let him and his son enjoy their prize. Ken, my boy, my folly has made a beggar of you. I have lost all now, but one thing. I am still a gentleman of a good old race. He cannot rob ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... very hour, and that he, the father, was not much better. That his son Ruediger had indeed at times, when he went that way, been to see Pastor Schweidler, whom he had first known upon a journey; but that he swore that he wished he might turn black if he had ever used any folly or jesting with the cursed devil's whore his daughter; much less ever been with her by night on the Streckelberg, or embraced ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... Demetrius, I told him of your stealth unto this wood: He follow'd you; for love I follow'd him; But he hath chid me hence, and threaten'd me To strike me, spurn me, nay, to kill me too: And now, so you will let me quiet go, To Athens will I bear my folly back, And follow you no farther. Let me go: You see how simple and how ...
— A Midsummer Night's Dream • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... our rights, this insult to the sympathies of our common nature? Yes—connected with the resolution was a preamble explaining its OBJECT. Read it, fellow countrymen, and be equally astonished at the impudence of your rulers in avowing such an object, and at their folly in adopting such an expedient to effect it. The lips of a free people are to be sealed by ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... his cell. I inquired what crime he had committed. His daughter, they said, was betrothed to a young man, and at the time appointed for the marriage the old man did not bring the girl to the bridegroom as stipulated. He had consequently already been here in prison for two months to pay for his folly, and would possibly have to remain some months longer, for, according to Beluch law—which is in force here—such ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... nearly damaged that poor young counter-jumper, my dear," said the Count, advancing hastily to meet Emilie. "Do you not know how to hold your horse in?—And there you leave me to compromise my dignity in order to screen your folly; whereas if you had but stopped, one of your looks, or one of your pretty speeches—one of those you can make so prettily when you are not pert—would have set everything right, even if ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... in the letter of October 3, 1796. To what escapade Lamb refers I do not know, but he was addicted to folly. It was Sam Le Grice of whom Leigh Hunt in his Autobiography tells the excellent tale that he excused himself to his master for not having performed a task, by the remark that he had ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... bold to shew that folly which tormented my inward spirits, enuying to see what others possessed, that was a continuall delight in pleasure and solace without any wearines in full cloying, and thus diuers times my hart being set on fire by my eies, and extreemely burning, my minde still fixed vpon delightfull ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... "Oh, folly! it will excite scandal, and be repulsive to my feelings. This loft over a former groggery is no place for you: the news will spread from Chincoteague to Arlington. Every Custis that lives will ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... the slow recession of bodies from the sun, is a lively image of the reluctance with which we first abandon the light of virtue. The beginning of folly, and the first entrance on a dissipated life cost some pangs to a well-disposed heart; but it is surprising to see how soon the progress ceases to be impeded by reflection, or slackened by remorse. For it is in moral as in natural things, ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... are so vividly described that our charmed fancy places us among them as we read, and we, for a time, abandon ourselves to a belief in their reality. It was, however, begun as a political satire; in the insignificance of the court of pigmies, he attacks the feebleness and folly of the new reign. Flimnap, the prime minister of Lilliput, is a caricature of Walpole; the Big Indians and Little Indians represent the Protestants and Roman Catholics; the High Heels and Low Heels stand for the Whigs and Tories; and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... perfected in her weakness. He makes the Creator address the objectors in this not very flattering vein:- "I, that could make Daniel, a sucking babe, to judge better than the wisest lawyers; a brute beast to reprehend the folly of a prophet; and poor fishers to confound the great clerks of the world - cannot I make a woman to be a good ruler over you?" This is the last word of his reasoning. Although he was not altogether without Puritanic leaven, shown particularly in what ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a harsh sound that came back from the rock above him. By no means always, far from even often, a hardened or an evil man, to-day the stream of thought was stirred and sullied from every black pool and weedy depth, and there came floating up folly, waste, and sin. His reason slept. Had he, by some Inquisitor not to be disobeyed, been suddenly obliged to give why and wherefore for his hatred, the trained intellect must have agreed with the questioner. "These causes ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... said Chicot, who did not understand this difference between words and gestures, "there is still time; do not commit a folly; you cannot mount on horseback in ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... the luxurious extravagance of Mademoiselle Deschamps, the cushion of whose chaise-percee, was trimmed with point-lace of very considerable value, and the harness of whose carriage was studded with paste, in imitation of diamonds. This woman, however, lived to repent of her folly; and if she did not literally die in a poorhouse, she at least ended her ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... forms of democracy as from a pestilence. The simple habits of the Spartan life assisted to confirm the Spartan prejudices. A dinner, a fine house, these sturdy Dorians regarded as a pitiable sign of folly. They had no respect for any other cultivation of the mind than that which produced bold men and short sentences. Them, nor the science of Aristotle, nor the dreams of Plato were fitted to delight. Music and dancing were indeed cultivated among them, and with success and skill; but the music and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with a white face. "You will have a better opportunity of judging," he said, "when Colonel Starbottle has the honor of waiting upon you from me. Meantime, I thank you for reminding me of the indiscretion into which my folly, in still believing that this thing could be settled ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... spoke of her story in the duchy's drawing-rooms; for what had Loveday been, at the most charitable count, but a young female—less humanly speaking, even a young person? And what was the spring of her mad crimes but folly, mere weak, feminine folly? Even an improper motive—one of those over-powering passions one reads about rather surreptitiously in the delightful works of that dear, naughty, departed Lord Byron—would have been somehow more ... more ... satisfactory. One could only whisper such ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... of air-castles and rainbow gold, a fool's paradise and the garden where grew most thickly the apples of Sodom. In it were caged all greed, all extravagance, all jealousies; hopes, fears, passions that may be born of and destroy the soul of man; and within it also flamed splendid folly and fealty to some fixed star, and courage past disputing, and clear love of God and country. Yonder glass of fashion and mould of form had stood knee-deep in an Irish bog keeping through a winter's night a pack of savages at bay; this jester at a noble's elbow knew when ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... Benevolence, which is the legal remedy for social crime, favours social crime. As regards pauperism in general, it is an eternal natural law, according to the theory of Malthus: "As the population unceasingly tends to overstep the means of subsistence, benevolence is folly, a public encouragement to poverty. The State can therefore do nothing more than leave poverty to its fate and at the most soften death for the poor." With this amiable theory the English Parliament combines the opinion that pauperism is poverty for which the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... destruction of all who bore one name. Still nobody suspected the true culprits, search was fruitless, inquiries led nowhere: the marquise put on mourning for her brothers, Sainte-Croix continued in his path of folly, and all things went on as before. Meanwhile Sainte-Croix had made the acquaintance of the Sieur de Saint Laurent, the same man from whom Penautier had asked for a post without success, and had made friends with him. Penautier had meanwhile become the heir of his father-in-law, the Sieur ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... ghost drew as large a "house" last night as Barnum's Circus or any of the theaters. There was a bigger crowd about "Cohnfeld's Folly" than there was three weeks ago when the flames gutted the buildings from Mercer to Greene streets and did damage away up in the millions. The wraith was not due till midnight, but the street was packed with watchers ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... two men to guard Moriarity, for in the darkness Sam's condition was not noticed, but seeing the folly of attempting a pursuit in so dark a night, Chip's whistle recalled them, and the chagrined and disappointed operatives ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... The love of Christ has constrained me to speak about my former lies, thefts, fraud, &c., that you might be benefited. Do not think that I am a fool, and therefore I have told out my heart in my folly; but I have made myself a fool for the benefit of your souls. May God in mercy, for His dear Son's sake, grant that these pages may be a savour of life unto ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... 'tis past, but I gaze on it now With quivering breath and throbbing brow: 'Twas there she nursed me, 'twas there she died; And memory flows with lava tide. Say it is folly, and deem me weak While the scalding tears drop down my cheek: But I love it, I love it, and cannot tear My soul from a mother's ...
— The Old Arm-Chair • Eliza Cook
... always be. But I think that art, by creating a common intellectual atmosphere between all countries, might—if it could not overshadow the world with the silver wings of peace—at least make men such brothers that they would not go out to slay one another for the whim or folly of some king or minister, as they do in Europe. Fraternity would come no more with the hands of Cain, nor Liberty betray freedom with the kiss of Anarchy; for national hatreds are always ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... took a steady look to windward. "My boys," said he, "the gale is breaking. By the time we get up to the wreck, it will be calm enough to allow us to climb on board. It is to be hoped that her crew will stick by the vessel. No! what folly! they have launched another boat, and she will meet, I fear, with the fate of the first." He was silent for some minutes, while he looked now and again towards the wreck. "I feared so!" he cried at last; "they ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... driving through the lake. We might have turned back, but obstinacy prevented me, and an incomprehensible impulse of defiance mastered me—that impulse which made me bathe from the yacht in the middle of the Black Sea and has impelled me to not a few acts of folly ... I suppose it is a special neurosis. We drive on and make for the little islands and strips of land. The direction is indicated by bridges and planks; they have been washed away. To cross by them we had to unharness the horses and lead them over one by one.... The driver unharnesses ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... a winner to withdraw or to say more, and all the rest of the night he must look on at the progress of this folly, and make gallant attempts to lose, with the not uncommon consequence of winning more. The first dawn of the 11th February found him well-nigh desperate. It chanced he was then dealer, and still winning. He had just dealt a round of many tens; every ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... guilt or folly, a man convicted under such circumstances, and, especially, a man executed after such a trial, will be the most terrible fruit that Slavery has ever borne, and will excite the execration of ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... Then highest rate, when fury-factions roar, And folly's choicest fools the most despise:— —O happy Poet! laid in peace before Rival intolerants each 'gainst other flamed, And flames were slaked in blood, and all the grace Of life before that sad illiterate gloom Puritan, fled ashamed: While, as the red moon ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... and strength, and endurance. A bad wife is confusion, weakness, discomfiture, and despair. No condition is hopeless where the wife possesses firmness, decision, and economy. There is no outward prosperity which can counteract indolence, extravagance, and folly at home. No spirit can long endure bad domestic influence. Man is strong, but his heart is not adamant. He delights in enterprise and action; but to sustain him he needs a tranquil mind, and a whole heart. He needs his moral force in the conflicts of the world. To recover ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... this is simple folly. You know it is true; and you know, also, that there is no good whatever to be got from ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... nature. Passion is, or was, in his youth; but he is not young now. In his first hasty marriage I knew that the fire would soon burn itself out—it has left nothing but ashes. Once he deceived himself, and sorely he has reaped the fruits of his folly. The result is, that he will live to old age without ever having known the blessing of ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... poenae with malum culpae. From the same point of view we lose our indignation at that intellectual incapacity of the great majority of mankind which in life so often disgusts us. In this Sansara, as the Buddhists call it, human misery, human depravity and human folly correspond with one another perfectly, and they are of like magnitude. But if, on some special inducement, we direct our gaze to one of them, and survey it in particular, it seems to exceed the other two. This, however, is an illusion, and merely the effect ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... savages to an imaginary line in the woods it would have been the height of folly to have suffered that line to protect them. Had that been done the war could never cease. Even if the territory had been exclusively that of Spain and her power complete over it, we had a right by the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Monroe • James Monroe
... our ridiculous damsels have sucked in their share of it. In a word, they are a strange medley of coquetry and affectation. I plainly see what kind of persons will be well received by them; if you will take my advice, we will play them such a trick as shall show them their folly, and teach them to distinguish a little better the people they have to ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... cheerful than the heathen's (Homer)? is his hope more near, his trust more sure, his reading of fate more happy? Ah no! He differs from the heathen poet chiefly in this, that he recognizes for deliverance no gods nigh at hand, and that, by petty chance, by momentary folly, by broken message, by fool's tyranny, or traitor's snare, the strongest and most righteous are brought to their ruin, and perish without word of hope. He, indeed, as part of his rendering of character, ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... causing the court to swerve from its patronage of so bold a measure! The court, the government, the committee, and the leading men in the mercantile interests of the metropolis and the provinces, pursued the even tenor of their way, amused at the folly of so many persons in a condition of life to know better. These fears proved how large a portion of the classes who occupy the higher positions in society are ignorant of their own countrymen, and of the world. They could not comprehend ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Her birth was the birth of a lady, but that was all; her talents had never been tried, but she thought of them more indifferently than they deserved. She felt, therefore, that she had no just ground to hope for much; but she was determined that no folly on her own part should rob her of any chance that fortune might ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Shakespeare; and by different roads they reach the same height of tragic awe, but when improbability, which in these days does duty for imagination, is mixed with the familiar aspects of life, the result is inchoate and rhythmless folly, I mean the regular and inevitable alternation and combination of pa and ma, and dear Annie who lives at Clapham, with the Mountains of the Moon, and the secret of eternal life; this violation of the first principles of art—that is to say, of the rhythm of ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... slave states. In regard to England, I feel encouraged. In an absence of fifteen years I see marked improvement. Man is more respected, as man, than he once was; the masses are coming up; and the wealthy and the noble are more considerate. It is a great folly and a wickedness to think that the nobility of England are weak, vicious, unfeeling, proud, and self-indulgent. Some of the noblest characters of England are to be found in the peerage—men who "fear God and work righteousness." Their homes are often centres of ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... dunce; wooden spoon; no scholar. [insulting terms for ignorant person: see also imbecility 499, folly 501] moron, imbecile, idiot; fool, jerk, nincompoop, asshole [vulgar]. [person with superficial knowledge] dilettante, sciolist[obs3], smatterer, dabbler, half scholar; charlatan; wiseacre. greenhorn, amateur &c (dupe) 547; novice, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... may as well Forbid the sea for to obey the Moon As or by oath remove or counsel shake The fabric of his folly, whose foundation Is ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Europe, wherever the race of Europe may be settled. Everywhere else the faction is militant; in France it is triumphant. In France is the bank of deposit and the bank of circulation of all the pernicious principles that are forming in every state. It will be a folly scarcely deserving of pity, and too mischievous for contempt, to think of restraining it in any other country whilst it is predominant there. War, instead of being the cause of its force, has suspended its operation. It has ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... young lord, so that, not considering the folly of what he was about, hurrying down the hill, he made his way ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... seems to me in my folly that it were well to strike the head of the snake and not its tail, for without the tail the head may live, but not the tail ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... witness to this final settlement, Elisha Boone.—Twenty years ago, Miss Boone, I was a citizen of this town. I was the owner of these acres. I am Richard Perley. In those days I was a wild fellow—I thought then, a wicked one; but I have learned since that I was not, for folly is not crime. In those days—I was barely twenty-five—your father had a hard ground to till in his way of life. I became his patron, and from that I became his slave. I never exactly knew how it came about, but within a few years most ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... with me in this wise? Shall thy folly know no bound? Canst thou look upon these temples, with their locks of silver crowned, And still deem thee young and shapely? Nay, my soul, let us be sage; Act as they that have already sipped the wisdom-cup of age. Men have loved and ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... In truth, there never has been any such creature. In the replies of Gregory to Augustine (601 A.D.)[1330] arbitrary rules about marriage and sex are laid down with great elaboration. They are prurient and obscene. The mediaeval sophistry about the birth of Christ is the utmost product of human folly in its way. Joseph and Mary were married, but the marriage was never consummated. Yet it was a true marriage and Mary became a mother, but Joseph was not the father. Mary was a virgin, nevertheless. This might all pass, as it does in modern times, as an old tradition which is not worth ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... us go back. The hoists will take us out.' 'Folly,' was the answer. 'I shall be all right. Why, a Martian has no physical weakness or dread. Come, Dodd, you have not yet acquired the Martian defiance of accident, disease, or death. You are sneaking back under the cover of fear ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... phrase, lay in the words "by law established" rather than in the preceding words "the Church"; so that, in many instances, a mere accident in the Church's history displaced the remembrance of its divine constitution, and led on to the folly of supposing that the act of the State, human law, could create and constitute a Church! To assert the truth against so patent a delusion was timely, and indeed needful, a century ago. Would that it were needful ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... same time. I also mentioned that during the last days of my stay at Peli I felt so irritable that I scarcely knew what I was doing. The letter, while I was writing it, seemed to me very clever; now it appears to me as the height of folly. It was simply that my vanity did not permit me to revoke clearly and decidedly what I had written previously. I counted upon my aunt grasping at the opportunity I gave her for settling matters, and then I meant to make my appearance as the ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... here and elsewhere, mean wickedness, forwardness, folly, vicious folly or uncalled-for wrath. Here Arabic teaches a good lesson, for ignorance, intemperance and egoism are, I repeat, the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... not stop until he reached his companions at the feed-rack in camp. He knew also that to attempt to find his way to headquarters such a distance and on foot, with night so near at hand, would be worse than folly. He would only exhaust his strength and make it harder for his friends to find him before his water, which could not last another day, should give out. Someone, he knew, would take his trail in the morning. The only ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... by cool, logical reasoning; and, moreover, it has more than once flashed upon me in the course of my life, but I shut my eyes to it. The approach of death has only opened them to see very clearly what I was more than half aware of before. Do not suppose that I make this confession of my folly to you in order to propitiate the Deity. I do not for a moment expect that the God whom I have neglected all my life can be humbugged in this way. No, I have deliberately cast Him off in time past, and I recognise it as my due that He should cast me off now. It is too late ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... a mien in which more dignity than he ordinarily assumed was worn, Mauleverer now moved towards Lucy, who was leaning on her partner's arm. The earl, who had ample tact where his consummate selfishness did not warp it, knew well how to act the lover, without running ridiculously into the folly of seeming to play the hoary dangler. He sought rather to be lively than sentimental; and beneath the wit ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... would "keep the public faith," and "not add repudiation to the list of crimes which destroy confidence in republican governments," his arguments shed no light on the meaning of those words. He declared that "waste and corruption had piled up the national debt," and that it was "criminal folly to exempt bonds from taxation." Then, entering into a general discussion of finance, he arraigned the war party for its extravagance, infidelity, and plundering policy. "Those who hold the power," he said, "have not only hewed up to the line of repudiation, but they have ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... have thought about nothing at all. I ought to warn you that you are going to accomplish an act of folly. You persist; then I ask to share in this act of folly, and I even ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... me, what a world of lies it is, for that this 'hidden wife,' is a myth, and an inspiration from Lucifer to Madame, I am quite sure of. But alas! should their be one grain of truth in the bushel of lies, and that he cannot prove to 'society's' satisfaction that 'twas only a grain of youthful folly, that his manhood in its nobility had nothing to do with it. If he cannot do this, then he will never ask me to be anything more to him than what I shall always be, his friend; poor darling, what with his father's grief at his misguided mother's frailty, he has ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... I began to realise the danger to which I had exposed, not only myself, but also my poor Minna, and the folly of which I had been guilty through my ignorance of the terrible difficulties of secretly crossing the frontier—difficulties concerning which Moller had foolishly allowed me ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... forget the Germany we know, the Germany still there for our affection and delight, the dear country of quaint fancies, of music and of poetry. That Germany has vanished, the wiseacres say, the dreamy unworldly German is no more with us, it is sheer sentimental folly to believe in him and to waste your time looking for him. But how if you know him everywhere, in the music and poetry that he could not have given us if they had not burned within him, and in the men and women who have accompanied you as friends throughout life,—how ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... I was straining to catch a repetition of the sound from below. Time was slipping rapidly away, and to sit on meant inevitable discovery. The watch might waken or the mate appear to surprise me in converse with my nocturnal visitor. It would be folly to attempt to conceal his presence and I despaired of getting him back to the shore while his present mood held, although I remembered that the small boat, which had been lowered after we went aground, was still moored to the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... as regicides, when the word Jacobin sent a thrill of horror down every respectable spinal chord, the daughter of Necker raised her voice to say that if, during the stormy years just passed, the people of France had done nothing but stumble from crime to folly and from folly to crime, the fault did not, after all, lie with them, but with the old regime. If Frenchmen had failed to show the virtues of freemen, it was because they had for so many centuries been treated as slaves. This was in 1818, ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... superannuates persons from the vse of physicall meanes, or that at a hundred yeares of age 'tis either a folly or a shame to vse meanes to liue longer, and yet I haue knowne many send to mee for their seuerall troubles at a hundred yeares of age, and this day a poore woeman being a hundred and three yeares and a weeke old ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... who goes about investigating the sentiments of—of women like that. But you have your impressions of my character fully formed, and I shall not be guilty of the folly of trying to change them. To-morrow, I shall relieve Nepaug of my objectionable presence, and, I hope, you will cease to fear me as a disturbing element when I am ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... he who had never loved with a pure, unsullied devotion, grieved to hear of the joys of one who had. It is bad enough, that certain luxuries of life have been denied us, either through our own folly or the still less bitter interference of others. How much worse it becomes when we are forced to listen to the story of their worth, from those who have gained what we have so recklessly lost! Such words as those addressed by Henry Rayne, were perhaps the only ones that could impress the hardened ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... he had undone me by his obstinacy, and that I would not favour or colour in any sort his former folly. He then asked me, whether that were my resolution? I answered, that it was. He then replied in these words, 'I know then, sir, what course to take,' and went out of my cabin into his own, in which he was no sooner entered than I heard a pistol go off. I sent ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... coming under any obligation to God for his repentance, but rather (it might almost be imagined) putting God under obligation by it, is one to which experience lends no support. Repentance is an adequate sense not of our folly, nor of our misery, but of our sin: as the New Testament puts it, it is repentance toward God. It is the consciousness of what our sin is to Him: of the wrong it does to His holiness, of the wound which it inflicts on His ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... unto the Father's end in giving of his elect to Jesus Christ. The Father's end was, that they might come to him, and be saved by him; and that, says the Son, shall be done; neither sin nor Satan, neither flesh nor world, neither wisdom nor folly, shall hinder their coming to me. "They shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... but I did so with a very bad grace; and I am sorry to say that my father's words had at that time little or no effect on my heart. I say at the time, for afterwards, when it was too late, I thought of them over and over again, and deeply repented of my wilful obstinacy and folly. ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... handwriting. "All I know is that your father bought it out of a pawnbroker's shop in Stowley, which is some town in the Midlands. Your father was travelling there and saw the brooch by chance. As I always thought opals unlucky he was anxious to make me see the folly of such a superstition, so he bought the brooch and took it away with him. Afterwards, I believe, he received a letter from the pawnbroker, saying that his assistant had sold the brooch by mistake, that the time for redeeming it had not run out when ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... no doubt. When and where has it been otherwise? You shudder, my Aimee; but, trust me, there is inconceivable folly in the idea of opposing Bonaparte. As he said in Egypt, it is impious and vain. Trust me, love, and ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... kind of jocose or burlesque satire peculiar to Italy, in which the literature is extremely rich. If it serves the cause of wisdom, it is always in the mask of folly. The poet who carried this kind of writing to the highest perfection was Berni (1499-1536). Comic poetry, hitherto known in Italy as burlesque, of which Burchiello was the representative in the fifteenth ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... thou hast not forgotten me, or thou hadst married ere this, and hadst not been the one to find me, buried here from sight of man. I am a priest, a monk: what but folly or sin can come of you and me living neighbours, and feeding a passion innocent once, but now (so Heaven wills it) impious and unholy? No, though my heart break I must be firm. 'Tis I that am the man, 'tis I that am the priest. You and I must meet no more, till I am schooled by solitude, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Your folly has ruined all our peace. And who knows where it may yet end? —Your poor father but yesterday showed me this text: With bitter grief he showed it me, poor man! and do you lay it ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record. My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was, all ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... him, now," exclaimed Ragideau, warmly. "But you are wrong in marrying him, and you will one day, rue it. You are committing a folly, viscountess, for you want to marry a man who has nothing but his hat and ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... attack, just the trailing to herd the men to the northeast. And Rynch had lost the first tight pinch of panic, though he knew the folly of underestimating the unknown. ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... daughters, and royal sisters. Pacify ye for us Horus (i.e. the King), the Lord of the Palace, whose Souls are mighty, and whose word of truth is great." A break of fifteen lines occurs in the text here, and the words that immediately follow the break indicate that Piankhi is upbraiding Nemart for his folly and wickedness in destroying his country, wherein "not a full-grown son is seen with his father, all the districts round about being filled with children." Nemart acknowledged his folly, and then swore fealty to Piankhi, promising to give him more gifts than any ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... to Paper the same Man that he is in the Freedom of Conversation. I have hardly seen a Line from any of these Gentlemen, but spoke them as absent from what they were doing, as they profess they are when they come into Company. For the Folly is, that they have perswaded themselves they really are busy. Thus their whole Time is spent in suspense of the present Moment to the next, and then from the next to the succeeding, which to the End of Life is to pass away ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... talk, having the same logical value, our author, in his enthusiasm for [172] slavery, delivers himself thus: "For myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley, than the slave of a majority in the House of Commons, or the slave of my own folly." Of the four above specified alternatives of enslavement, it is to be regretted that temperament, or what is more likely, perhaps, self-interest, has driven him to accept the fourth, or the latter of the two deprecated ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... with Meeres to China. These voyages, and the continual intercourse with Europeans, which their increasing trade in fur produced, necessarily enlarged the ideas of these children of Nature; and as they were not under the dominion of that folly which, in common with the Greenlanders, possesses some of the most civilized nations in Europe, of considering themselves the first people upon earth, they soon acquired our manners, and derived all the advantage that could be expected from the opportunities of improvement thus afforded them. ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... an author are acceptable: execution will not always follow conception; and the last may often give as much instruction, though not equal delight with the former: as an instance, who does not see the folly of attempting to do every thing in Handy, though he is more the shadow, than the substance of ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton
... brothers and sisters and cousins, understanding the bargain which I had made, told me that I had given four times as much for it as it was worth. This put me in mind of what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money, and they laughed at me so much for my folly that I cried with vexation. My reflections on the subject gave me more chagrin than the whistle ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... a shining army on the march to meet the Future. It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which a Leading Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly. He would not have it laughed at; still he could not admit it as more than a skirt of the robe of his Idea. For let none think him a mere City merchant, millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world. He had ideas to shoot across future Ages;—provide against the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... long hair and such a beard that he disgusted me. I refused him, and my godfather then asked to speak to me alone. He made me sit down in my mother's boudoir, and said to me: "My poor child, it is pure folly to refuse Monsieur Bed——. He has sixty thousand francs a year and expectations." It was the first time I had heard this use of the word, and when the meaning was explained to me I wondered if that was the right thing to ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... wants, of course, but the rich, bad luck and misfortune to them one and all, have their troubles also, because they don't know what they want, the discontented, lazy, good-for-nothin' varmints. May they all perish be their own folly before the world or their money comes to ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... simply Roselaer de Werve, and not Baroness de Werve, is the fault of the General; but his obstinacy and folly shall cost him dear. ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... in the beginning of going anywhere near Newfoundland that winter, but the word was passed to me from old John Rose of Folly Cove that if I thought of running down for a load of herrin', then he'd ought to have a couple o' thousand barrels, by the looks o' things, fine and fat in pickle, against Christmas Day, and old John Rose being a great friend of mine, and the market away up, I ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... dignity—and, indeed, their only chance of being permitted to live—and to make friends try to enter into the lives of the people whom they would propitiate, and so become teachers and moralists and preachers. And soon for penalty of their rashness and folly they forget their own land of the solitary, and its speech perishes from their lips. The traveller's tales are of all the most precious, because he comes from a land—the poet's solitude—which no other feet have trodden and which no ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... Alexandria, we have from this time forward to mark the growth only of vice and luxury, and to measure the wisdom of Ptolemy Soter by the length of time that his laws and institutions were able to bear up against the misrule and folly of his descendants. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... dominant race in ranching, stimulated cattle prices far beyond what was justified by the laws of supply and demand. The boom in live stock in the Southwest which began in the early '80's stands alone in the market variations of the last half-century. And as if to rebuke the folly of man and remind him that he is but grass, Nature frowned with two successive severe winters, humbling the kings and princes of ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... strong, contending for enlargement with Shem and his 3,000,000. Consider what has been effected during the last fifty years. There is no vaunting of scouts now. No Indian gentlemen making themselves merry about the folly of thinking to convert the natives of India; magnifying the difficulties of caste; and setting our ministers into brown studies and speech-making in defense of missions. No mission has yet been an entire failure. We ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... it was inexpedient for wise men to withhold from it the tribute of outward reverence. The discourses of Paul were very far from complimentary to parties who valued themselves so highly on their intellectual advancement; for he quietly ignored all their speculations as so much folly; and, whilst he propounded his own system with the utmost confidence, he, at the same time, supported it by arguments which they were determined to reject, but unable to overturn. It is pretty clear that they were to some extent under the influence of pique and irritation ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... ten thousand oxen in one drove, without keeper or master, except Him who made them, and gave them these open plains for their pasture! Ay, it is here that man may see the proofs of his wantonness and folly! Can the proudest governor in all the States go into his fields, and slaughter a nobler bullock than is here offered to the meanest hand; and when he has gotten his sirloin, or his steak, can he eat it with as good a relish as he who has sweetened his food with wholesome toil, and earned it according ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... out of chaos when the army he had taken such pains to discipline began to melt away, having been by political folly recruited for short terms, and the work was to be all done over. Again and again during the war regiments which had been enlisted for short periods left him at the most critical moment. Very typical occurrences he himself tells of, when Connecticut troops ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... "'What folly has seized you?' cried the eldest of the wise men. 'Is this a gift to bear to the King of Kings in ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... travellers," the host protested, "I feed 'em. Arecomus don't arrest travellers, he horses 'em. Anyhow, there's no magistrate here; talking of arresting is folly. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... giant's breast. With joy the prostrate monster heard Victorious Rama's welcome word, And straight Kakutstha's son, the best Of men, in words like these addressed: "I yield, O chieftain, overthrown By might that vies with Indra's own. Till now my folly-blinded eyes Thee, hero, failed to recognize. Happy Kausalya! blest to be The mother of a son like thee! I know thee well, O chieftain, now: Rama, the prince of men, art thou. There stands the high-born Maithil dame, There ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... consternation; there was a general flight from the open country, and the gates of the towns were closed. "The people," says an historian, "cursed the folly of King Ptolemy, and invoked the names of Philip and Alexander, the guardian deities of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... ever-present Lord. Yet it is appointed as the norm a human agency by which He works for the soul, not only in the solemn ministration of His great ordinances of blessing but in spiritual assistance and guidance as well. It will be the pastor's folly if he so insists upon the imagery of shepherding as to forget for one moment that the "sheep" are also, and in a larger aspect, his equal brethren and sisters, "the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty." It will be his folly, and the ruin of his true authority, ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... inherent capacity can be recognized and utilized when known to exist, it is safer and wiser to develop by training the highest average of ability in leadership than to trust to untrained "common sense" or to the possible advent of a genius. History has abundantly proved the folly of attempting, on any other basis, to cope with the unpredictable occurrence of genius in the hostile leadership. With the actual exercise of leadership in war restricted to the reality of war, there is emphasized the need of peacetime training—training of subordinates in efficient ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... the Abbaye had not lost her charm; the most eminent men and women of her day followed her there, and enjoyed her quiet (not very eloquent) conversation. She had a wholesome heart; it kept her from folly when she was young, from a too over-facile sensitiveness to which an impressionable, sympathetic temperament would have betrayed her. Her firm, sweet nature was not flurried by excitement; she had a steadfastness in her social relations ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... of the banquet; feeling that when life is worthless it is folly to live, you cannot shrink from the lofty resolution by which we are bound, you cannot pause on our joyful journey of departure from the scenes of earth—I wrong you even by a doubt! Let me now, rather, ask your attention for a worthier subject—the enumeration of the festal ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... damage and spoil of provisions by sea, and divers came not so well provided as they would, upon a report, whilst they were in England, that now there was enough in New England." Even this small store was made smaller by the folly of several who exchanged food for beaver skins, and, the Council suddenly finding that famine was imminent "hired and despatched away Mr. William Pearce with his ship of about two hundred tons, for Ireland to buy more, and in the mean time went on ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... desire to force upon me, the accumulation of gold being one of my chief hobbies; eccentric, amusing, perhaps even ridiculous, but—well, there it was. And I accompanied my final statement with a shrug of the shoulders which I intended should express deprecation of my own folly. I intercepted a glance and nod of intelligence and amusement which passed round the circle at this naive confession of folly on my part, and at that moment the king, shorn of his temporary glories, and with a distinct frown of annoyance ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... colony, I believe, do we give exclusive support to the religion of the minority. Nay, even in those parts of empire where the great body of the population is attached to absurd and immoral superstitions, you have not been guilty of the folly and injustice of calling on them to pay for a Church which they do not want. We have not portioned out Bengal and the Carnatic into parishes, and scattered Christian rectors, with stipends and glebes, among millions of Pagans and Mahometans. We keep, indeed, a ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... from Hugh and Maura, at least until the eve of its occurrence, the publishing of their banns in the chapel would have, of course, disclosed it. When his sister heard that the arrangements were completed, she poured forth a torrent of abuse against what she considered the folly and simplicity of a mere boy, who allowed himself to be caught in the snares of an artful girl, with nothing but a handsome face to recommend her. Felix received all this with good humor, and replied only in a strain of jocularity to every ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... which they had so firmly believed, had done nothing but divert useful resources into useless channels; while, on the other hand, the frigates, which they had proposed to lay up altogether, so as to save themselves from 'the ruinous folly of a Navy,' had already won a brilliant series of duels ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... humming-bird in Surinam, sucked its eggs and snared the birds. To all the contention which arose over these statements, Madame Merian could oppose only her word. Men who knew that her statements in regard to Europe were indisputable, decided that her word could not be taken in Asia. A very common folly; but two hundred years have passed, 1866 arrives, and her justification with it. An English traveler named Bates, has recently rescued quite large finches from the Mygale, and poisoned himself with its saliva in preparing them ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... unnatural and useless things in the world. But, on the other hand, my dear friend, we have learnt where to stop, and a great secret it is, but one I fear you know nothing about at present; so the sooner you make yourself acquainted with it the better. There's a limit to everything but folly—even to striking deep into the soil. And as to the soil being better so very far down, nobody can believe it; for why should it be? The great art is to make the most of what is at hand, as we do. Time enough to go into the depths when you have used up what is so much easier got at. The ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... rest of him. Nevertheless, the place became a byword, even in the back-blocks; and when at last the good Bishop Methuen had the hardihood to include it in an episcopal itinerary, there were admirers of that dear divine who roundly condemned his folly, and enemies who no ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... is sheer folly to waste more time hunting for this bird. My father is old, and if he dies I ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... waste of time To mingle song and reason; Folly calls for laughing rhyme, Sense is out of season. Let Apollo be forgot When Bacchus fills the drinking-cup; Any catch is good, I wot, If good fellows take it up. Let philosophers protest, Let us laugh, And quaff, And a fig for ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... in all those ancient hills, I succumbed to an execrable impulse to take her forcibly in my arms and kiss her! I don't know why I did it, or how, but that is just what happened. My shame, my horror over the transcendental folly was made almost unbearable by the way in which she took it. At first I thought she had swooned, she lay so limp and unresisting in my arms. My only excuse, whispered penitently in her ear, was that I couldn't help doing what I had done, and that I deserved to be drawn and quartered for taking advantage ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... while the animal appetites are strong and clamorous. Our will tires easily and readily yields to social pressure. In many individuals the raw material of character is terribly flawed by inheritance. So the young, with a maximum of desire and a minimum of self-restraint, slip into folly, and the aging backslide into shame. Human nature needs a strong reenforcement to rouse it from its inherited lethargy and put it on the toilsome upward track. It needs redemption, emancipation from slavery, a breaking ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... he recognized the well-known features and solemn pomposity of a civil officer of Portsmouth, who was often employed to search the American packets, in pursuit of delinquents of all degrees of crime and folly. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... procuring of that higher quality of domestic service, which can alone relieve the mistress of a household from a burthen so heavy to be borne. Unlike so many of those around him, who would spend on a single pretending and comfortless entertainment, in which the ostentatious folly of one contended with the ostentatious folly of another a sum that, properly directed, would introduce order and system into a family for a twelvemonth, by commanding the time and knowledge of those whose study ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... private and national Ireland, present condition of the Church in wretched condition of plantations in condition of the clergy of first conquerors of, English Catholics Rebellion in its misery and want the causes of this misery its intolerable hardships the folly and vanity of its landowners pride and vanity of its people discouragement of its manufactures idleness and sloth in cruelty by which it is governed bondage of its laws counteracting influence against the government foundations ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... Folly and Wisdom, Heavenly twins, Sons of the god Imagination, Heirs of the Virtues—which were Sins Till Transcendental Contemplation Transmogrified their outer skins— Friend, do you follow me? For I Have lost myself, ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... feeling as there is in the heart of an ordinary man, and without the sense of the man either! For who that thinks twice about it would make a world where everything is only born to die?—and for no other use at all! Bah! It is sheer folly and wickedness to talk to me of a God!—a God, if there were one, would surely be far above torturing the creatures He has made, all ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
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