“Greatest fools are oft most satisfied.”
Le plus fou souvent est le plus satisfait.
Satire 4, l. 128
Satires (1716)
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Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux30
French poet and critic 1636–1711Related quotes
“Any simpleton can speak with confidence. Sometimes the greatest fools have the most bravado.”
Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer
Source: Keys to the Demon Prison
“Oft has good nature been the fool's defence,
And honest meaning gilded want of sense.”
William Shenstone (1714–1763) English gardener
To a Lady (1736)
John Stuart Mill book Utilitarianism
Source: Utilitarianism (1861), Ch. 2
Context: It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
“There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy.”
Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men
No Country for Old Men (2005)
Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist
Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 6, Hierarchies, Complex Fractal Dimensions, And Log Periodicity, p. 185.
“In man's most dark extremity
Oft succour dawns from Heaven.”
Walter Scott The Lord of the Isles
Canto I, stanza 20.
The Lord of the Isles (1815)
“Anyone who rushes toward an unknown peril simply to satisfy a desire for excitement is a fool.”
Roger Zelazny book Today We Choose Faces
Part 2, Chapter 3 (p. 78)
Today We Choose Faces (1973)
“The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.”
Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom