H. Rider Haggard Quotes

The truth is perilous never to the true, Nor knowledge to the wise; and to the fool, And to the false, error and truth alike, Error is worse than ignorance.

To the ignorant, even the words of wise seem foolishness.

Education, n.: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

Just as a wise man can say something foolish, a fool can say something wise.

When the ignorant have become numerous or powerful enough, they have been referred to by a special name. This names is 'the Wise'.

Fools usually know best that which the wise despair of ever comprehending.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

The wisest among us is a fool in some things.

You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?

The only difference between a wise man and a fool is that the wise man knows he's playing.

The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Führer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.

Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.

Even if a fool lived with a wise man all his life, he would still not recognise the truth, like a wooden spoon cannot recognise the flavour of the soup.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

It is a common observation that any fool can get money; but they are not wise that think so.

The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.

If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not.

If to take up books were to take them in, and if to see them were to consider them, and to run through them were to grasp them, I should be wrong to make myself out quite as ignorant as I say I am.

The wise are not learned, the learned are not wise.

Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish.

Remember that the greatest fool in the world may ask more than the wisest man can answer.

I no have education. I have inspiration. If I was educated, I would be a damn fool.

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits.