A Quote by John Adams

It is folly to anticipate evils, and madness to create imaginary ones.

John Adams

Quote Topics

Anticipate Create Evils Folly Imaginary Madness

Quote Author

John Adams
American - President
October 30, 1735 - July 4, 1826

There are in life real evils enough, and it is folly to afflict ourselves with imaginary ones; it is time enough when the real ones arrive.

Benjamin

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Edmund Burke

Real evils can be either cured or endured; it is only imaginary evils that make people anxiety-ridden for a lifetime.

Earl Nightingale

Imaginary evils are incurable.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.

Oliver Goldsmith

Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.

John Ruskin

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness it is to be expecting evil before it comes.

Seneca the Younger

There is this of good in real evils; they deliver us, while they last, from the petty despotism of all that were imaginary.

Charles Caleb Colton

Hospitality sometimes degenerates into profuseness, and ends in madness and folly.

Francis Atterbury

for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men

Herman Melville

I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than the dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation.

Robert E. Lee

It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.

Herodotus

gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.

May Sarton

I have a funny mental framework when I do physics. I create an imaginary audience in my head to explain things to - it is part of the way I think. For me, teaching and explaining, even to my imaginary audience, is part of the process.