Earnestness Quotes

There is no substitute for thoroughgoing, ardent, and sincere earnestness.

Most shows find themselves descending into sentimentality or earnestness at some point but, with ‘Community,’ the joke is always on.

We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect but how we should pray being as we now are … It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

Earnestness is the devotion of all the faculties.

People take things at face value on social media. Earnestness is the assumption.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

The most precious wine is produced upon the sides of volcanoes. Now bold and inspiring ideals are only born of a clear head that stands over a glowing heart.

Even where there is talent, culture, knowledge, if there is not earnestness, it does not go to the root of things.

Being traditional is a choice for me. South Indian families bring up their children with a sense of freedom, self-respect and self-value. We do whatever we have to with earnestness and honesty, including being uninhibited. Yet we hold onto our roots.

The earnestness of life is the only passport to satisfaction of life.

Without earnestness no man is ever great, or does really great things. He may be the cleverest of men; he may be brilliant, entertaining, popular; but he will want weight. No soul-moving picture was ever painted that had not in it depth of shadow.

This Government has found occasion to express, in a friendly spirit, but with much earnestness, to the Government of the Czar, its serious concern because of the harsh measures now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia.

Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.

And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.

The stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out; but there is still time for those to whom freedom and parliamentary government mean something, to consult together. Let me, then, speak in truth and earnestness while time remains.

All the sobriety which’ religion needs or requires is that which real earnestness produces.

For me, earnestness is the greatest crime an Englishman can commit.

I think the earnestness of what we’re saying and what other bands like us are totally saying – or other queer bands – is ‘We exist.’

Art is based on a strong sentiment of religion,–on a profound and mighty earnestness; hence it is so prone to co-operate with religion.

There`s a good sense of fun and lack of sarcasm in the Texans, maybe a little earnestness which is kind of why I found it quite Australian.

Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.

My own will and desires were now very much broken, and my heart was with much earnestness turned to the Lord, to whom alone I looked for help in the dangers before me.

I’m sure Sting’s a lovely guy. It’s just that nobody wants to be seen as that holier-than-thou thing. That over-earnestness is a bit of a problem with people in bands and celebrities or whatever.

I would hope that nothing that I write would ever seem earnest because I subscribe absolutely to Franz Nietzsche’s claim when he says, “Ah, earnestness, the sure sign of a slow mind.” Earnest people are always a bit on the thick side in my experience.

We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.

Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it’s their kryptonite

Taking fun as simply fun and earnestness in earnest shows how thoroughly thou none of the two discernest.

My God, help me always resolutely to strive, and, through life and death, to force my way unto Thee.

Earnestness can ferment into sentimentality.

The ways in which Oscar Wilde was attacking the Romantics that preceded him, and the Romantic ideas that preceded him, were very similar to what the glam-rockers, particularly Bowie and Bryan Ferry, were attacking in the earnestness of ’60s culture. Trying to shock, but with wit, cleverness, and homosexuality.

Prayers belong strictly to the worship of God. Fasting is a subordinate aid, which is pleasing to God no farther than as it aids the earnestness and fervency of prayer.

Enthusiasm is the parent of enterprise. Search and you will find that at the base and birth of every great business organization was an enthusiast, someone consumed with earnestness of purpose, with confidence in their powers, with faith in the worthwhileness of their endeavors.

Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp’s rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,–a Sharp’s rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice.

That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history.

Up, then, with speed, and work;
Fling ease and self away–
This is no time for thee to sleep–
Up, watch, and work, and pray!

I have this wholesome disposition in a lot of my characters. A certain earnestness.

Earnestness is highly underestimated. It comes from the core, while hip is trying to impress you on the surface.

Art rests on a kind of religious sense, on a deep, steadfast earnestness; and on this account it unites so readily with religion.

Patience is only one faculty; earnestness the devotion of all the faculties. Earnestness is the cause of patience; it gives endurance, overcomes pain, strengthens weakness, braves dangers, sustains hope, makes light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them.

BEG, v. To ask for something with an earnestness proportioned to the belief that it will not be given.

I do not say the mind gets informed by action, — bodily action; but it does get earnestness and strength by it, and that nameless something that gives a man the mastership of his faculties.

The object of education is not merely to enable our children to gain their daily bread and to acquire pleasant means of recreation, but that they should know God and serve Him with earnestness and devotion.

God’s truth is too sacred to be expounded to superficial worldliness in its transient fit of earnestness.

Earnestness and sincerity are synonymous.

The tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn’t remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself.

I sometimes think my earnestness is confused for stupidity, but it shouldn’t be.

Earnestness is the salt of eloquence.

Prayer is not eloquence, but earnestness; not the definition of helplessness, but the feeling of it; not figures of speech, but earnestness of soul.

Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great.

The best remedy for dryness of spirit, is to picture ourselves as beggars in the presence of God and the Saints, and like a beggar, to go first to one saint, then to another, to ask a spiritual alms of them with the same earnestness as a poor fellow in the streets would ask an alms of us.

The measure of our love for others can largely be determined by the frequency and earnestness of our prayers for them.

Enthusiasm is the intoxication of earnestness.

I don’t think of myself as particularly earnest. I have long bouts of cynicism and skepticism. So much of my early life was full of uncertainties. It still is. My “Buddha book” expresses that. Perhaps that’s what created this impression of earnestness.

How do you go about finding anything?
By keeping your mind and heart on it.
Interest there must be and steady remembrance.
To remember what needs to be remembered
is the secret of success.
You come to it through earnestness

[Ridicule] laughs at all those who see the earnestness of life and who still believe in true feelings and in serious thought … It soils the hope of youth. Only shameless vice is above its reach.

Earnestness is not by any means everything; it is very often a subtle form of pious pride because it is obsessed with the method and not with the Master.

Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.

Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life. Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling.

Earnestness alone makes life eternity.

[Freud’s] sense of reality is less clouded by wishful thinking than is the case with other people and [he combines] the qualities of critical judgment, earnestness and responsibility.

In this Epistle, the Apostle seeks, with great earnestness, to confirm the Christian converts in the belief of that Gospel, which he had so faithfully preached.

I have long discovered that geologists never read each other’s works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.

I am not commanding you, but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it to the earnestness of others.

This world is given as the prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world, is truer still of the world to come.

Let there be cultivated an awareness in every member’s heart of his own potential for bringing others to a knowledge of the truth. Let him work at it. Let him pray with great earnestness about it

A man must keep his earnestness nimble, to escape ridicule.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

Earnestness can go wrong in hip hop. On this album, it goes very right.

Many of the white people [who] have been instruments in the hands of God for our good, even such as have held us in captivity, are now pleading our cause with earnestness and zeal.

This world is given as a prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world is truer still of the world to come.

Let true Christians then, with becoming earnestness, strive in all things to recommend their profession, and to put to silence the vain scoffs of ignorant objectors.

I knew if I evoked that stuff too easily or gratuitously, as a way of assuaging my fears of not being edgy or whatever, the writing would fall apart. This book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was going to have to have some earnestness in it.

A man without earnestness is a mournful and perplexing spectacle. But it is a consolation to believe, as we must of such a one, that he is the most effectual and compulsive of all schools.

With sincerity and earnestness one can realize God through all religions.

Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.