When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.

Otto von Bismarck

The Lord commonly gives riches to foolish people, to whom he gives nothing else.

Martin Luther

The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.

Miguel de Cervantes

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don't have brains enough to be honest.

Benjamin Franklin

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.

Jane Austen

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

William Blake

It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is foolish to pretend that one is fully recovered from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When we are born, we cry, that we are come To this great stage of fools.

William Shakespeare

Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There are more fools in the world than there are people.

Heinrich Heine

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

Mark Twain

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Henry David Thoreau

Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

Ambrose Bierce

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

Albert Einstein

Optimism is a good characteristic, but if carried to an excess, it becomes foolishness. We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so.

Theodore Roosevelt

However big the fool, there is always a bigger fool to admire him.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Alfred North Whitehead

Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

Alexander Pope

So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.

Charles Lamb

A rich man without charity is a rogue; and perhaps it would be no difficult matter to prove that he is also a fool.

Henry Fielding

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

Andrew Carnegie