noun
definition
Foolishness.
example
It'd be folly.
definition
Thoughtless action resulting in tragic consequence.
definition
A fanciful building built for purely ornamental reasons.
Examples of folly in a Sentence
I saw the folly of my forefathers in the histories.
I say, this is folly!
It would have been folly after that experience to risk defeat and perhaps disaster in assailing formidable positions, effectively held and assiduously fortified.
It is folly to speak of a donation of lands which did not belong to the pope, or to maintain that the freedom of the Americans was extinguished by the decision of Alexander VI.
Growing up I had a white welsh pony named Folly.
Nothing material is worth a thought; anxiety is folly; your Father, who feeds His birds and clothes His flowers, will feed and clothe you.
If he killed her, Kris would finally see the folly of his ways.
He told a parable about the folly of focusing on material wealth.
The issues are altogether too gigantic for such faith to be other than utter folly.
The wallabies found at Folly Farm are Bennett's wallabies, the Tasmanian subspecies of the red-necked wallaby.
Her sublime folly turned out to be wiser than their wisdom; in two months, from May to July 1429, she had freed Orleans, destroyed the prestige of the English army at Patay, and dragged the doubting and passive king against his will to be crowned at Reims. All this produced a marvellous revulsion of political feeling throughout France, Charles VII.
Save us from self-justifying histories and from moral equations that excuse our folly.
I considered using the tools available as weapons but dismissed the action as folly.
At the moment, hiding anything from Alex would be folly.
In the presence of the rising storm the duchess was bewildered, seeing clearly the folly of the policy she was obliged to carry out no less than its difficulty.
Faringdon House, close to the church, was built by Henry James Pye (1745-1813), poet laureate from 1790 to 1813, who also caused to be planted the conspicuous group of fir-trees on the hill east of the town called Faringdon Clump, or locally (like other similar groups) the Folly.
After three such good fortunes by marriage Norfolk in his folly looked for a crown with a fourth match, listening to the laird of Lethington when he set forth the scheme by which the duke was to marry a restored queen of Scots and rule Scotland with her who should be recognized as Elizabeth's successor.
After the declaration of independence the history of Uruguay becomes a record of intrigues, financial ruin, and political folly and crime.
They make counter attacks on polytheism as a folly and on the shamefulness of obscene myths.
It may suffice to repeat that no domestic tragedy has ever taught with more effective simplicity and thrilling truthfulness the homely double lesson of the folly of selfishness and the mad rashness of crime.
The figures are no longer abstractions; they are concrete examples of the folly of the bibliophile who collects books but learns nothing from them, of the evil judge who takes bribes to favour the guilty, of the old fool whom time merely strengthens in his folly, of those who are eager to follow the fashions, of the priests who spend their time in church telling "gestes" of Robin Hood and so forth.
The officer points out the folly of such a course, and the certainty that the republic, whose troops had triumphed over those of Prussia and Austria, will speedily disperse the untrained levies of Provence.
The parallel extends even to the secret negotiations; for, if Austria could have been induced in May 1807 to send an army against Napoleon's communications, his position would have been fully as dangerous as before Austerlitz if Prussia had taken a similar step. Once more he triumphed owing to the timidity of the central power which had the game in its hands; and the folly which marked the Russian tactics at Friedland (14th of June 1807), as at Austerlitz, enabled him to close the campaign in a blaze of glory and shiver the coalition in pieces.
The folly of the monarchs of the Holy Alliance in Europe gained for the writings of Montholon and Las Cases (that of Gourgaud was not published till 1899) a ready reception, with the result that Napoleon reappeared in the literature of the ensuing decades wielding an influence scarcely less potent than that of the grey-coated figure into whose arms France flung herself on his return from Elba.
It was, however, by their own folly that the Franks lost Jerusalem in 1244.
Resolute in recognizing erudition as the chief concern of man, he sighed over the folly of popes and princes, who spent their time in wars and ecclesiastical disputes when they might have been more profitably employed in reviving the lost learning of antiquity.
In 1862 he published his pamphlet entitled The Three Panics, the object of which was to trace the history and expose the folly of those periodical visitations of alarm as to French designs with which England had been afflicted for the preceding fifteen or sixteen years.
But although silenced the prophet was doomed, and the folly of his disciples precipitated his fate.
Realizing his folly he abdicated on the 6th of December 1796, and retired to Sardinia, That princess, in spite of her French origin, resisted the attempts of France, then dominated by Cardinal Richelieu, to govern Savoy, but her quarrels with her brothers-in-law led to civil war, in which the latter obtained the help of Spain, and Christina that of France.
But in that case we must either reject the testimony of the same Hegesippus that up to their death, and that of Symeon son of Clopas, successor in the Jerusalem see of James the Lord's brother, " who suffered martyrdom at the age of one hundred and twenty years while Trajan was emperor and Atticus governor," " the church (universal) had remained a pure and uncorrupted virgin " free from " the folly of heretical teachers "; or else we must reject the superscription, which presents the grandfather in vehement conflict with the very heresies in question.
It contains incomparable studies of the Florentine housewife and her husband, a grave business-like citizen, who falls into the senile folly of a base intrigue.
The statement 28 that God " chargeth His angels with folly " applies to all angels.
In it kings and princes, bishops and popes alike are shown to be in bondage to Folly; and no class of men is spared.
There is only one answer; the principal cause of this complete and irretrievable collapse is to be sought for in the folly, egotism and selfishness of the Polish gentry, whose insane dislike of all discipline, including even the salutary discipline of regular government, converted Poland into something very like a primitive tribal community at the very time when every European statesman, including the more enlightened of the Poles themselves, clearly recognized that the political future belonged to the strongly centralized monarchies, which were everywhere rising on the ruins of feudalism.
During the six years which preceded his deposition in 1091, El Motamid behaved with valour on the field, but with much meanness and political folly.
While in this phase he wrote his novels Yeast and Alton Locke, in which, though he pointed out unsparingly the folly of extremes, he certainly sympathized not only with the poor, but with much that was done and said by the leaders in the Chartist movement.
The Protestants were now at the height of their power, but their ascendancy was about to be destroyed, and that rather by the folly and imprudence of their leaders than by the skill and valour of their foes.
For some time Abbas Hilmi clung to his idea of liberating himself from all control, and secretly encouraged a nationalist and antiBritish agitation in the native press; but he gradually came to perceive the folly, as well as the danger to himself, of such a course, and accordingly refrained from giving any overt occasion for complaint or protest.
It would be folly to think of introducing unrestricted parliamentary government at present, the conditions for its successful working not existing.
His character for pettishness and folly was thus amply illustrated.
He was disliked by the citizens of London; and this ill-feeling was heightened when Gloucester, who was a favourite of the Londoners, returned to England and was doubtless reproached by Beaufort for the folly of his undertaking.
The contrast is marked by the humour which seems to combine a cynical view of human folly with a deeply pathetic sense of the sadness and suffering of life.
From this crowning folly death delivered him on the 22nd of February 1371.
James declined to commit this chivalrous folly; but, for lack of scouts, permitted Surrey to out-manoeuvre him and pass, concealed by a range of hills, across his front, to a position north of Flodden, on his lines of communication.
But Elizabeth had seen Arran in London and had probably detected his hysterical folly.
It abounds in error as to matters of fact, contradicts human experience, reason and morals, and is one tissue of folly, deceit, enthusiasm, selfishness and crime.
His homilies, which are still preserved, furnish ample apology for the partiality of the people, exhibiting the free command of a pure and copious vocabulary, an inexhaustible fund of metaphors and similitudes, giving variety and grace to the most familiar topics, with an almost dramatic exposure of the folly and turpitude of vice, and a deep moral earnestness.
He was an eye-witness on more than one occasion of the folly and excesses of the French Revolution; and these scenes not only increased his love for his church, but strongly impressed him with that dread of anarchy, of popular movements ending in bloodshed, and of communistic and socialistic views which characterized him in after life.
But a dispute between the king and the parliament concerning the form of the royal oath having arisen, a group of demagogues with criminal folly provoked disturbances and erected barricades (May 14th).
Ibn Zobair refused haughtily, and Hosain, with a contemptuous criticism of his folly, ordered his army to break up for Syria.