
Life of Marcus Cato
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1745) : Fools make feasts and wise men eat them.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Life of Marcus Cato
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.”
Plutarch's Life of Cato
Variant: Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise.
“Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to”
Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
“Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.”
Book III, Ch. 8
This quote is a paraphrase of a lengthier statement, as follows: We ordinarily see, in the actions of the world, that Fortune, to shew us her power in all things, and who takes a pride in abating our presumption, seeing she could not make fools wise, has made them fortunate in emulation of virtue; and most favours those operations the web of which is most purely her own; whence it is that the simplest amongst us bring to pass great business, both public and private; and, as Seiramnes, the Persian, answered those who wondered that his affairs succeeded so ill, considering that his deliberations were so wise, ‘that he was sole master of his designs, but success was wholly in the power of fortune’; these may answer the same, but with a contrary turn.
From Essays of Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton (1877), Book the Third, Chapter VIII — Of The Art Of Conference. Note : this is the version found at Project Gutenberg.
Attributed
“Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it.”
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Context: Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called the hydrostatic paradox of controversy?
Don't know what it means? - Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it.
“Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.”
“Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools.”
Brickhill 1954, p. 44. Note: (also quoted as "...for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.") In Reach for the Sky, this quote is attributed to Harry Day, the Royal Flying Corps First World War fighter ace.
“5779. Wise Men learn by other Men's Harms; Fools, by their own.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“No fool can be silent at a feast.”
Epictetus, Fragment 71, translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0237&query=chapter%3D%23192&chunk=book