Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 99
“Tis an old maxim in the schools,
That flattery's the food of fools;
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit.”
Cadenus and Vanessa (1713)
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Jonathan Swift 141
Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet 1667–1745Related quotes
“Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.”
Act V, scene i.
All Fools (1605)
Thesis and Antithesis http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/antithesis.html, st. 4.
“Tis hard if all is false that I advance,
A fool must now and then be right by chance.”
Source: Conversation (1782), Line 96.
“It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling
To get adapted to my kind of fooling.”
"It Takes All Sorts" (1962)
1960s
“Tis better people think you a fool, then open your mouth and erase all doubt.”
Variously attributed to Lincoln, Elbert Hubbard, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin and Socrates
Misattributed
Variant: It is better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
“Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.”
"On Wit and Humour"
Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)
“Now such an one for daughter Creon had
As maketh wise men fools and young men mad.”
Life and Death of Jason, Book xvii, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Preface to the first edition of The American Credo : A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (1920)
1920s