#earnest

The first professional play I ever saw was The Importance Of Being Earnest, and I just fell in love. ↗

— Kim Cattrall

#earnest #ever #fell #first #i

Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#business #earnest #game

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#time

Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self — it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are elicited. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long-rooted privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do we take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation; and what is called weakness of character seems in most cases to consist of the inaptitude for these sacrificial moods, of which one's own inferior self and its pet softnesses must often be the targets and the victims. ↗

— William James

#earnestness #anger

It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to where we are today, but we have just begun. Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today. ↗

— Barack Obama

#begun #better #bit #blood #children

The dangers which threaten us are twofold: First, from the Confederate forces, composed of men whose earnest convictions and reckless bravery it is idle to deny. ↗

— Robert Dale Owen

#composed #confederate #convictions #dangers #deny

It's so easy in these cabaret venues to get earnest. ↗

— Ana Gasteyer

#earnest #easy #get #these #venues

They were both in their own ways earnest; they both wanted to achieve some worthy end or other, change the world for the better. Such alluring, such perilous ideals! ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#earnest #ideals #change

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. ↗

— John Strachan

#belief #christian #confirm #converts #earnestness

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. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#certain #certain age #child #delivers #earnestness