A Quote by Jane Austen

I do not know whether it ought to be so, but certainly silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.

Jane Austen

Quote Topics

Always Cease Certainly Done Folly Know Ought People Sensible Silly Silly Things Things Way Whether Wickedness

Quote Author

Jane Austen
British - Novelist
December 16, 1775 - July 18, 1817

Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.

Jane Austen

There can be - there ought to be - no medium course; a love-affair is either sober earnest or contemptible folly, if not wickedness: to gossip about it is, in the first instance, intrusive, unkind, or dangerous; in the second, simply silly.

Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.

Jane Austen

Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly—because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to god and there’s always the chance that a folly will.

Desiderius Erasmus

The way to wickedness is always through wickedness.

Seneca the Younger

While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.

Abraham Lincoln

To tell your own secrets is generally folly, but that folly is without guilt; to communicate those with which we are intrusted is always treachery, and treachery for the most part combined with folly.

Samuel Johnson

Politeness is not always a sign of wisdom; but the want of it always leaves room for a suspicion of folly, if folly and imprudence are the same.

Walter Savage Landor

We are now to rank among the nations of the world; but whether our Independence shall prove a blessing or a curse must depend upon our own wisdom or folly, virtue or wickedness.... Justice and virtue are the vital principles of republican government.

George Mason

If you wouldn't live long, live well; for folly and wickedness shorten life.

Benjamin Franklin

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

James Madison

I think that I'm always going to think that it's silly to value certain things that no matter how many people find it really valuable, it's always just going to seem a little silly to me.

Regina Spektor

There is only one greater folly than that of the fool who says in his heart there is no God, and that is the folly of the people that says with its head that it does not know whether there is a God or not.

Otto von Bismarck

For mortal men there is but one hell, and that is the folly and wickedness and spite of his fellows; but once his life is over, there's an end to it: his annihilation is final and entire, of him nothing survives.

Marquis de Sade

...the sorrows God sent us brought comfort and strength with them, while the sorrows we brought on ourselves, through folly or wickedness, were by far the hardest to bear.