What are follies?

Famous quotes containing the word follies:

    Learn to live well, or fairly make your will;
    You’ve played, and loved, and eat, and drunk your fill:
    Walk sober off; before a sprightlier age
    Comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage:
    Leave such to trifle with more grace and ease,
    Whom Folly pleases, and whose follies please.
    Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

    I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomised our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me.
    Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

    The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture.
    Joseph Addison (1672–1719)