A Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The greatest piece of folly is that every man thinks himself compelled to hand down what people think they have known.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quote Topics

Compelled Down Every Every Man Folly Greatest Hand Himself Known Man People Piece Think Thinks

Quote Author

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German - Novelist
August 28, 1749 - March 22, 1832

There is this difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.

Charles Caleb Colton

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Francis Bacon

There is this difference between happiness and wisdom; he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.

Charles Caleb Colton

Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all … is not to have one.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.

Immanuel Kant

Even the humblest men have a strange reason behind greed. Every man thinks money solves problems - and every man thinks not just of himself, but his next three generations - there is a probability he will live to see those generations - and he wants to care for them in times of strife.

Siddharth Katragadda

Every man's vanity ought to be his greatest shame; and every man's folly ought to be his greatest secret.

Francis Quarles

Every man's occupation should be beneficial to his fellow-man as well as profitable to himself. All else is vanity and folly.

P. T. Barnum

Ignorance is servitude, because as a man thinks, so he is; a man who does not think for himself and allows himself to be guided by the thought of another is like the beast led by a halter.

Jose Rizal

A man who is not a fool can rid himself of every folly except vanity.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is the greatest folly of which a man can be capable to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world.

William Graham Sumner

Every one is least known to himself, and it is very difficult for a man to know himself.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

On the one hand, man is a body, in the same way that this may be said of every other animal organism. On the other hand, man has a body. That is, man experiences himself as an entity that is not identical with his body, but that, on the contrary, has that body at its disposal. In other words, man's experience of himself always hovers in a balance between being and having a body, a balance that must be redressed again and again.

Peter L. Berger

Every man who speaks out loud and clear is tinting the "Zeitgeist." Every man who expresses what he honestly thinks is true is changing the Spirit of the Times. Thinkers help other people to think, for they formulate what others are thinking. No person writes or thinks alone--thought is in the air, but its expression is necessary to create a tangible Spirit of the Times.

Elbert Hubbard

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