Old Fool Quotes & Sayings

Yes, we praise women over 40 for a multitude of reasons. Unfortunately, it's not reciprocal. For every stunning, smart, well-coiffed, hot woman over 40, there is a bald, paunchy relic in yellow pants making a fool of himself with some 22-year old waitress. Ladies, I apologize. For all those men who say, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?", here's an update for you. Nowadays 80% of women are against marriage. Why? Because women realize it's not worth buying an entire pig just to get a little sausage! — Andy Rooney

Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool. — Vladimir Nabokov

You oil field workers, come and listen to me I'm goin' to tell you a story about old John D. That company union made a fool out of me. That company union don't charge no dues It leaves you a-singing them Rockefeller blues. That company union made a fool out of me. Takes that good ole C.I.O., boys To keep that oil a-rollin', rollin' over the sea. Takes that good ole C.I.O., boys To keep that oil a-rollin' over the sea. — Woody Guthrie

Hopefully you'll grow old enough to realize that Achilles was a gorydamn fool. And we're fools all the more for not realizing he wasn't Homer's hero. He was warning. — Pierce Brown

For email, the old postcard rule applies. Nobody else is supposed to read your postcards, but you'd be a fool if you wrote anything private on one. — Judith Martin

You take a straight tip from the stable, Cokey, if you must hate, hate the government or the people or the sea or men, but don't hate an individual person. Who's done you a real injury. Next thing you know he'll be getting into your beer like prussic acid; and blotting out your eyes like a cataract and screaming in your ears like a brain tumour and boiling round your heart like melted lead and ramping though your guts like a cancer. And a nice fool you'd look if he knew. It would make him laugh till his teeth dropped out; from old age. — Joyce Cary

The old school of thought would have you believe that you'd be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn't what being in nature is all about. Rather, it's about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization - not bringing them with us. — Ryel Kestenbaum

And running, Will thought, Boy, it's the same old thing. I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and - lickety-split! I climb hills. Jim yells off church steeples. I got a bank account. Jim's got the hair on his head, the yell in his mouth, the shirt on his back and the tennis shoes on his feet. How come I think he's richer? Because, Will thought, I sit on a rock in the sun and old Jim, he prickles his arm-hairs by moonlight and dances with hoptoads. I tend cows. Jim tames Gila monsters. Fool! I yell at Jim. Coward! he yells back. And here we - go! — Ray Bradbury

There is, they say, no fool like an old fool. — William Golding

Always do I recall the parting words uttered by my old governor: "My boy, never ... " I won't set 'em down. I disregarded them fool-like and paid, and paid; had I a son I'd hand 'em on and ram 'em home. What fools we be when young. We fancy we be wise, forgetting that the old boys have graduated in the 'varsity of the world, the greatest 'varsity of all, and each day we should learn from they. — Robert Baden-Powell

Every success story has a parent who says, 'over my dead body.' Every success story has an old person who walks up to you and says, when you're acting the fool, 'you know I worry about you sometimes.' — Bill Cosby

Wonderful?" wrote J.O. Young in his diary. "To stand cheering, crying, waving your hat and acting like a damn fool in general. No one who has spent all but 16 days of the this war as a Nip prisoner can really know what it means to see 'Old Sammy' buzzing around over camp. — Laura Hillenbrand

An old fool is the worst of all fools. — Alice Von Hildebrand

When I was about ten years old, I gave my teacher an April Fool's sandwich, which had a dead goldfish in it. — Alan Alda

I am not a twenty-two-year-old boy; I am not a besotted fool. If you think to jilt me, think again. For I will not turn tail and run the other way as he did, oh no. I will find you, and I will drag you to the altar on your back if need be, no matter how you might be screaming. No matter how scandalous it might be. — Brenda Joyce

Criticism is an alluring substitute for creation, because tearing
things down, unlike building them up, really is as easy as falling off a stump. It's blissfully simple to strike a savvy, sophisticated pose by attacking someone else's creations, but the old adage is right: Any fool can burn down a barn. Building one is something else again. — Martha Beck

A healthy old fellow, who is not a fool, is the happiest creature living. — Gerald Brenan

Giles' shameful death was, of course, the sign of a crazy old man's inability to adapt to a new world. But his belief, that if there was no work to be had on our estate, then there was nothing for him but the workhouse, was probably right ... His death was not a sensible reaction to our attempts to farm rationally and profitably. The last thing I needed was a pang of conscience about such an old fool. And I would be mad myself if I even considered that his death should be laid at my door, that I had made his world
Wideacre
unbearable. — Philippa Gregory

Old fools are greater fools than young ones. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

I'm beginning to wonder," said Kent, sitting down now on an overturned wooden tub. "Who do I serve? Why am I here?"
You are here, because, in the expanding ethical ambiguity of our situation, you are steadfast in your righteousness. It is to you, our banished friend, that we all turn - a light amid the dark dealings of family and politics. You are the moral backbone on which the rest of us hang our bloody bits. Without you we are merely wiggly masses of desire writhing in our own devious bile."
Really?" asked the old knight.
Aye," said I.
I'm not sure I want to keep company with you lot, then. — Christopher Moore

In the drawing room [of the Queen's palace] hung a Venus and Cupid by Michaelangelo, in which, instead of a bit of drapery, the painter has placed Cupid's foot between Venus's thighs. Queen Caroline asked General Guise, an old connoisseur, if it was not a very fine piece? He replied Madam, the painter was a fool, for he has placed the foot where the hand should be. — Horace Walpole

It is bad enough to see young fools, but worse to see old fools. — Brigham Young

Major de Coverley is a noble and wonderful person, and everyone admires him.'
'He's a silly old fool who really has no right acting like a silly young fool. Where is he today? Dead? — Joseph Heller

The screech-owl, with ill-boding cry, Portends strange things, old women say; Stops every fool that passes by, And frights the school-boy from his play. — Mary Wortley Montagu

Like looking down on a lubricious chess set, isn't it? The king moves in tiny steps, with no direction, like a drunkard trying to avoid the archer's bolt. The others work their strategies and wait for the old man to fall. He has no power, yet all power moves in his orbit and to his mad whim. Do you know there's no fool piece on the chessboard, Kent?" "Methinks the fool is the player, the mind above the moves. — Christopher Moore

And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolations that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything; that only a fool can become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent nineteenth-century man must be, is morally bound to be, an essentially characterless creature; and a man of character, a man of action - an essentially limited creature. This is my conviction at the age of forty. I am forty now, and forty years - why, it is all of a lifetime, it is the deepest of old age. Living past forty is indecent, vulgar, immoral! — Fyodor Dostoevsky

I know you well enough, you are the old fool Van Helsing. I wish you would take yourself and your idiotic brain theories somewhere else. Damn all thick-headed Dutchmen! — Bram Stoker

There is no fool like an old fool. — American Proverb.

There's no fool like an old fool
you can't beat experience. — Jacob Braude

I think when you say to someone You are fool not to believe in evolution or a fool to believe the universe is 6000 years old. I think that gets translated as You are a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident is really in heaven with god. — Sam Harris

Ahoy there, Lord Pegleg!" cried the Fool. "Why are you hopping on one foot?"
"And what would you have do on one foot?" the man asked. "Pirouette? Besides, if I were to untie my other foot I would move too fast for anyone to see me. Why, I would trip over the equator in one stride."
"That's pretty quick," the Fool said.
"If you think that's quick," the man replied, "you should have seen me before the old arthritis set in. — Eric Metaxas

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him. — William Faulkner

To hell with your money
No no come on I belong to the family now see I know how it is with a young fellow he has lots of private affairs it's always pretty hard to get the old man to stump up for I know haven't I been there and not so long ago either but now I'm getting married and all specially up there come on don't be a fool listen when we get a chance for a real talk I want to tell you about a little widow over in town
I've heard that too keep your damned money
Call it a loan then just shut your eyes a minute and you'll be fifty
Keep your hands off of me you'd better get that cigar off the mantel — William Faulkner

You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a stolen glance, that is what you are hunting for, that is a motif for your aimless fantasy. You who always pride yourself on being an observateur must, in return, put up with becoming an object of observation. Ah, you are a strange fellow, one moment a child, the next an old man; one moment you are thinking most earnestly about the most important scholarly problems, how you will devote your life to them, and the next you are a lovesick fool. But you are a long way from marriage. — Soren Kierkegaard

Boggs comes a-tearing along on his horse, whooping and yelling like an Injun, and singing out: "Clear the track, thar. I'm on the waw-path, and the price uv coffins is a-gwyne to raise."
He was drunk, and weaving about in his saddle; he was over fifty year old, and had a very red face. Everybody yelled at him and laughed at him and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't wait now because he'd come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, "Meat first and spoon vittles to top off on." He see me, and rode up and says:"Whar'd you come f'm boy? You prepared to die?" Then he rode on. I was scared, but a man says: "He don't mean nothing; he's always a-carryin' on like that when he's drunk. He's the best-naturedest old fool in Arkansaw
never hurt nobody, drunk no sober. — Mark Twain

To A Young Beauty
Dear fellow-artist, why so free
With every sort of company,
With every Jack and Jill?
Choose your companions from the best;
Who draws a bucket with the rest
Soon topples down the hill.
You may, that mirror for a school,
Be passionate, not bountiful
As common beauties may,
Who were not born to keep in trim
With old Ezekiel's cherubim
But those of Beauvarlet.
I know what wages beauty gives,
How hard a life her servant lives,
Yet praise the winters gone:
There is not a fool can call me friend,
And I may dine at journey's end
With Landor and with Donne. — W.B.Yeats

A group of Nazis surrounded an elderly Berlin Jew and Demanded if him, 'Tell us, Jew, who caused the war?'
The little Jew was no fool. 'The Jews,' he said, then added, "and the bicycle riders.'
The Nazis were puzzled. 'Why the bicycle riders?'
'Why the Jews?' answered the little old man. — Nathan Ausubel

I've got cheekier with age. You can get away with murder when you're 71 years old. People just think I'm a silly old fool. — Bernard Manning

Now, it's time for me to lock up and go. Listen to me. Lock up an empty building that's gonna be torn down. Makes no sense. Like an old man tellin' a lie to his son from his death bed. What's the point? Who besides yourself are you fooling? — Dan Groat

And then, the last words Raspail ever said: 'I wonder why my parents didn't kill me before I was old enough to fool them.'
The slender handle of the stiletto wiggled as Raspail's spiked heart tried to keep beating, and Dr Lecter said, 'Looks like a straw down a doodlebug hole, doesn't it?' but it was too late for Raspail to answer. — Thomas Harris

How old must you be before words can no longer fool you? — Marty Rubin

What a madly gay little wine, my dear!" M. Cliquot said, repressing, but not soon enough, a grimace of pain.
"One would say a Tavel of a good year," I cried, "if one were a complete bloody fool." I did not say the second clause aloud.
My old friend looked at me with a new respect. He was discovering in me a capacity for hypocrisy that he had never credited me with before. — A.J. Liebling

The summer I turned eleven, I found out that ghosts are real.
Guess it's hard to rest nice and easy in your coffin if you got stuff on your mind. Your soul stays chained to earth instead of zipping up to heaven to sing in one of the angel choirs.
Sometimes ghosts show up in the msot peculiar places.
Sometimes ghosts fool you.
Then you are those ghosts that hang around because we have unfinished business. Business that sinks like old crawfish left in a bucket for a week. That's some nasty smell let me tell you.
But the most important thing I learned is that ghosts can help you spill your guts before guilt eats you up and leaves a hole that can't ever be fixed no matter how many patches you try to steam iron across it. — Kimberley Griffiths Little

He kept thinking about Mary. What a fool he'd been to let her go. To think, with the thoughtless assurance of youth, that the world was replete with endless possibilities. He'd thought it a mistake to choose so early in life and embrace the present good. He'd been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He'd kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time. ("Old Haunts") — Richard Matheson

There are moments in the life of old liars who have been play-acting all their lives when they are so carried away by the part they're playing that they actually do weep and tremble with excitement, in spite of the fact that at that very moment (or second later) they could have whispered to themselves: 'you're lying, you shameless old fool! Now, too, you're just acting a part in spite of all your "sacred" wrath and "sacred" moment of your wrath.' Dmitry frowned threateningly and looked at his father with indescribable contempt. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby, you fool!
Before today my body was useless.
Now it's tearing at its square corners.
It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot
and see - Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!
Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint. It was no more
than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.
She's been elected.
My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire. — Anne Sexton

Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool — Plato

Achilles died well"
"No. Achilles let his pride and rage consume him, and in the end, an arrow shot by a Pixie took him in the foot. There's much to live for besides this. Hopefully you'll grow old enough to realize that Achilles was a gorydamn fool. And we're fools all the more for not realizing he wasn't Homer's hero. He was warning. I feel men once knew that — Pierce Brown

By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It — Henry David Thoreau

He would use a bit of string this time, and at the critical moment, when the old fool was leaning over the chair at an angle of forty-five, and trying to reach a point three inches beyond what was possible for him to reach, the string would slip, and down he would slide on to the piano, a really fine musical effect being produced by the suddenness with which his head and body struck all the notes at the same time. And Aunt Maria would say that she would not allow the children to stand round and hear such language. — Jerome K. Jerome

You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love as soft men think. We have experimented with every human capacity to see which is strong and admirable and have shown that none is. There is only practicality. If the old God exists, he must be a murderer. But the one true god is Death. This is how it is - without cowardly illustrations. — Saul Bellow

Come aboard, come aboard!" cried the gay Bachelor's commander, lifting a glass and a bottle in the air. "Hast seen the White Whale?" gritted Ahab in reply. "No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all," said the other good-humoredly. "Come aboard!" "Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?" "Not enough to speak of - two islanders, that's all; - but come aboard, old hearty, come along. I'll soon take that black from your brow. Come along, will ye (merry's the play); a full ship and homeward-bound." "How wondrous familiar is a fool!" muttered Ahab; then aloud, "Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayest; well, then, call me an empty ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward there! Set all sail, and keep her to the wind! — Herman Melville

Every time I read the paper those old feelings come on.We are waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on. — Pete Seeger

You're never too old to make a fool of yourself — Michael Perkins

Busy old fool, unruly Sophie — Diana Wynne Jones

The conclusion to which I am ever more clearly coming is that the only hope of attaining a true system of economics is to fling aside,once and forever, the mazy and preposterous assumptions of the Ricardian school. Our English economists have been living in a fool's paradise. The truth is with the French school, and the sooner we recognize the fact, the better it will be for all the world, except perhaps the few writers who are far too committed to the old erroneous doctrines to allow for renunciation. — William Stanley Jevons

Let her alone,' said the enkanto, 'or I will curse you blind, lame, and worse.'
The old man laughed. 'I'm a curse breaker, fool.'
The elf grabbed one of the Jim Beam bottles from the table and slammed it down, so that he was holding a jagged glass neck. The elf smiled a very thin smile. 'Then I won't bother with magic. — Holly Black

There is no fool to the old fool. — John Heywood

I'm a man of a certain age - old enough to have been every kind of fool- and I find to my surprise that the only counsel I have to pass on is this: Never let your name be found in a dead man's trousers. — Louis Bayard

Western man has tried for too many centuries to fool himself that he lives in a rational world. No. There's a story about a man who, while walking along the street, was almost hit on the head and killed by an enormous falling beam. This was his moment of realization that he did not live in a rational world but a world in which men's lives can be cut off by a random blow on the head, and the discovery shook him so deeply that he was impelled to leave his wife and children, who were the major part of his old, rational world. My own response to the wild unpredictability of the universe has been to write stories, to play the piano, to read, listen to music, look at paintings - not that the world may become explainable and reasonable but that I may rejoice in the freedom which unaccountability gives us. — Madeleine L'Engle

Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It's a face that is searching and open and kind. It's a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me. — Wesley Morris

Betsy Trotwood don't look a likely subject for the tender passion, but the time was, Trot, when she believed in that man most entirely. When she loved him, Trot, right well. When there was no proof of attachment and affection that she would not have given him. He was a fine-looking man when I married him", said my aunt, with an echo of her old pride and admiration in her tone. "I was a fool; and I am so far an incurable fool on that subject, that, for the sake of what I once believed him to be, I wouldn't have even this shadow of my idle fancy hardly dealt with. For I was in earnest, Trot, if ever a woman was. There, my dear. Now, you know the beginning, middle, and end, and all about it. We won't mention the subject to one another any more; neither, of course, will you mention it to anybody else. This is my grumpy, frumpy story, and we'll keep it to ourselves, Trot! — Charles Dickens

The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale. — Orson Scott Card

Strive from the outset to express yourself with such clarity that a bright twelve-year-old would understand you. Any fool can make it complicated: it takes focus to make it simple. — Keith Evans

I was interviewing an elder, Chief Fool's Crow, who was the ceremonial chief. He was 103 years old. I was getting his information on the history of Lakota horses. He told me the story of Hidalgo and Frank Hopkins. — John Fusco

I used to love you I still do So Selfish I love the old you The you that didnt shoot drugs ... The you that didnt get beat on by men You laugh in my face and call me a fool But its true I still love you Sometimes,I can see the old you When your eyes flash When you almost look alive — Henry Rollins

Nor could you clarify this confusion by assuming that the old man had been a victim of hallucination. Bartholomew wasn't that type of person. He was neither a liar nor a fool. — Lloyd C. Douglas

I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it. — George Bernard Shaw

I would find no value in the allegiance of a fool ready to give himself up to any old hag of Black Imagination who presented herself. I will accept your allegiance. For now. But if I ever decide you're useless, you are a dead man."
To be killed by you is to be desired more than a life excluded from your service."
(Redd and Sacrenoir) — Frank Beddor

Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one. — Herman Melville

There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better. — John Brunner

If you want to live and you want to prosper, you've got to be ambitious. You've got to be ready to sacrifice leisure and pleasure, and you've got to plan ahead. I was forty years old before I had any money at all. But these things don't happen overnight. Now, how many people are there who will wait that long to be successful, and work all the time? Not very many. Maybe they're right. Maybe I'm a bloody fool. But I don't think I am. — Roy Thomson

There was no fool like an old fool. — Karen McQuestion

By means of supernatural horror we may evade, if momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration. What a weird scenario. So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are destined to a fool's fate that deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe. — Thomas Ligotti

An old doting fool, with one foot already in the grave. — Plutarch

Symbols

A storm-beaten old watch-tower,
A blind hermit rings the hour.

All-destroying sword-blade still
Carried by the wandering fool.

Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade,
Beauty and fool together laid. — W.B.Yeats

I found my spirit wanted to choose between only two things - suicide, or the dreams I'd had in my youth. I am an old fool who borrowed the dreams of a young fool. — Kurt Vonnegut

Yet by such worthless beings is a great nation to be governed and even made to deify their old king because he is only a fool and a maniac, and to forgive and forget his having lost to them a great and flourishing empire. — Thomas Jefferson

Killy arched an eyebrow in disbelief. Don't be thinkin' you can deceive this old man. I've been makin' a fool of myself over women since before you were born. — Pamela Clare

A face stared up at her from the mirror beside her hand. Was that really what she looked like? Was that really what she looked like, all sharp lines and huge silver-grey eyes? Certainly, no one would ever call those features beautiful, Jame thought ruefully; but were they really enough like a boy's to have fooled that old man the alley? Well, maybe with that long black hair out of sight under a cap. It was a very young face and a defiant one, she thought with a odd sense of detachment, but frightened, too. And those extraordinary eyes ... what memories lived in them that she could not share? Stranger, where have you been she asked silently. What have you seen? The thin lips locked in their secrets.
"Ahhh!" Jame said in sudden disgust, tossing away the mirror. Fool, to be obsessed with a past she couldn't even remember. But it was all behind her now. — P.C. Hodgell

It has been said that there is no fool like an old fool, except a young fool. But the young fool has first to grow up to be an old fool to realize what a damn fool he was when he was a young fool. — Harold Macmillan

I'd Rather Be an Old Man's Sweetheart (Than a Young Man's Fool). — Candi Staton

I don't fool you, do I? Those others" - he waved a vague hand to indicate their
missing comrades - "they think I'm all that - but you know better, don't you."
"Know what?" she'd asked.
He leaned forward, smelling of beer and cigarettes. "You know I'm a fraud. I can
feel the beast inside me, screaming to get out. And if I loose it, it will pull me up to greatness despite myself."
"So why not let it free?" She hadn't been a werewolf then. The world had been a gentler place, the monsters safely in their closets, and she had been brave in her ignorance.
His eyes were old and weary, his voice slurring a bit. "Because then everyone would
see," he told her.
"See what?"
"Me. — Patricia Briggs

I hate old people, I hate children. I think any celebrity that adopts a child from a third world country is a fool. — Joan Rivers

As he was wont to remark, Nature has had her day; she has finally exhausted through the nauseating uniformity of her landscapes and her skies, the sedulous patience of men of refined taste. Essentially, what triteness Nature displays, like a specialist who confines himself to his own single sphere; what small-mindedness, like a shopkeeper who stocks only this one article to the exclusion of any other; what monotony she exhibits with her arrangements of mountains and seas! Page 20.
There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artifice. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Here's something else I'd like your opinion about," I said. "If he went back underground and sat down again in the same spot, wouldn't the sudden transition from the sunlight mean that his eyes would be overwhelmed by darkness?"
"Certainly," he replied.
"Now, the process of adjustment would be quite long this time, and suppose that before his eyes had settled down and while he wasn't seeing well, he had once again to compete against those same old prisoners at identifying those shadows. Would he make a fool of himself? Wouldn't they say that he'd come back from his upward journey with his eyes ruined, and that it wasn't even worth trying to go up there? And would they
if they could
grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there and kill him? — Plato

Coco Chanel once said that what makes a woman look old is trying desperately to look young. Why should one be ashamed to be 84? Why do you have to say that you're 52? Nobody's going to believe you anyway, so why be such a fool? It's nice that you got to be so old. It's a blessing. — Iris Apfel

The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. — Henry David Thoreau

An old fool is worse than a young one: For the young may always grow wise. (Zohair) — Idries Shah

If you'd ever had a grown-up daughter you'd know that by comparison a bucking steer is easy to manage. And as to knowing what goes on inside her - well, it's much better to pretend you're the simple, innocent old fool she almost certainly takes you for. — W. Somerset Maugham

Amelia furrowed her brow and said adamantly. "I'm not staying here tonight. No way!"
Rick cleared his throat and was about to tell her there was no other hotel in town. They had no choice but to stay here. After a moment, he thought better of it. He made it his goal to never argue with an irate woman. If he had anything to say, it was better to wait until she was calm. He knew that much about women.
When Rick was old enough to date, his father had warned him: "Any man who is not afraid of a woman's wrath is a fool. Wait until she's calmed down before talking with her."
Rick gave a curt nod. He thought it best to do as his father had warned. — Linda Weaver Clarke

AS I EXPECTED, I was treated by Scipio's conquerors as a harmless old fool with wisdom. The criminals called me "The Preacher" or "The Professor," just as they had on the other side.
I saw that many of them had tied ribbons around their upper arms as a sort of uniform. So when I came across a man who wasn't wearing a ribbon, I asked him jokingly, "Where's your uniform, Soldier?"
"Preacher," he said, referring to his skin, "I was born in a uniform. — Kurt Vonnegut

He who breaks a resolution is a weakling; He who makes one is a fool. — Farquhar McGillivray Knowles

Call me a sentimentalist, but I like the idea of you in one piece. Besides, she's not the only one who might be interested in your tasty flesh.'
I tilt my head. 'Who told you I was tasty?'
'Haven't you heard that old saying? Tasty as a fool?'
'You made that up.'
'Huh. Must be an angelic saying. It's to warn the foolish about things that go bump in the night.'
'It's daytime.'
'Ah. So you don't deny that you're foolish? — Susan Ee

Our divorce was an optical illusion, surely, because I am often still there, in my old home with my family. I can so easily fool myself, even without a scope, a lens, a patch of sky to measure my trauma, my blues, my perspective or my period of mourning. Suspension of disbelief can be a very real kind of haunting. — Jalina Mhyana

Even now, at 82 years old, if I don't learn something every day, you know what I think? It's a day lost. Now, I don't practice every day. I just take the guitar, swear at it. But I should be swearing at myself. But I fool with music. I'm doing something musically all the time. And my ears are wide open for anything I can hear. — B.B. King

Maybe you shake your head, but let me learn a lesson right now: plenty knowledge is in this world. Enough knowledge that you can pick and refuse. And if you want, you can refuse to know plenty things, don't care how true those things be. I know things you does not know, and things you will never know. And it is sake of that - sake of this knowledge - that people have looked on me and called me old fool or crazy. They treat me like I is retarded. Imagine that. I is the idiot because I know what they don't know. — Kei Miller

Because your heart will be hammered against him, and your strength will be tempered in his fire. — Robin Hobb

Everyone has an angel, a guardian who watches over us. We can't know what form they'll take. One day old man, next day little girl. But don't let appearances fool you, they can be as fierce as any dragon. Yet they are not here to fight are battles, but to whisper from a hearth. Reminding that it's us ... it's everyone of us who holds the power of the worlds we create. — Zack Snyder

If you want to live a long time, don't fool with nothing old but money, nothing big but a bank roll, nothing black but a Cadillac, nothing over twenty-two years, nothing that weighs over 130. If you do, you're in trouble. 'Cause when you're getting old and your cells gettin' low, you'll need a Delco battery to boost ya. — Satchel Paige