F 69
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)
“There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.”
Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865–1923) Mathematician and electrical engineer
[John J. B. Morgan and T. Webb Ewing, Making the Most of Your Life, 2005, 75 http://books.google.fr/books?id=5i-JlfkMEUUC&pg=PA75] <br class="br">Attributed <br class="br">Variant: No man really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions.
François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
La passion fait souvent un fou du plus habile homme, et rend souvent les plus sots habiles.
Variant translation: Passion often makes a fool of the cleverest man and often makes the most foolish men clever.
Maxim 6.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
“Good sense from a child was not necessarily contemptible beside foolishness from a grown-up.”
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright
The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 3
“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
Bacchæ l. 480 <br class="br">Variant translation: To the fool, he who speaks wisdom will sound foolish. <br class="br">Variant translation: He were a fool, methinks, who would utter wisdom to a fool. (translated by Edward Philip Coleridge) <br class="br">Variant translation: Wise words being brought to blinded eyes will seem as things of nought. ( translated by Gilbert Murray http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8418/8418-h/8418-h.htm) <br class="br">Source: The Bacchae
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer
"1901", p. 76. Sometimes misquoted as "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing". Sometimes misattributed to Bertrand Russell or Anatole France
A Writer's Notebook (1946)
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook (1949), entry for 1901
Sometimes misquoted as "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
Sometimes misattributed to Anatole France
Note that Russell does say something similar in Marriage and Morals (1929): "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible."
Misattributed
“A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.”
Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker
“A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.”
Un sot savant est sot plus qu'un sot ignorant.
Act IV, sc. iii
Les Femmes Savantes (1672)
