#earnest

I am interested in the notion that people can become so obsessed by their world that they lose sense and awareness of how they appear to other people. They're so earnest about it. But that's true of so many things. ↗

— Christopher Guest

#am #appear #awareness #become #earnest

I spent, as you know, a year and a half in a clergyman's family and heard almost every Tuesday the very best, most earnest and most impressive preacher it has ever been my fortune to meet with, but it produced no effect whatever on my mind. ↗

— Alfred Russel Wallace

#been #best #clergyman #earnest #effect

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

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

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

— Khaled Hosseini

#gullibility #honesty #think

Set yourself earnestly to see what you are made to do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it. ↗

— Phillips Brooks

#made #see #set #then #you

Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith. ↗

— Paul Tillich

#being #concerned #consists #earnestly #faith

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. ↗

— Benjamin Harrison

#because #being #concern #czar #earnestness

Extension work is not exhortation. Nor is it exploitation of the people, or advertising of an institution, or publicity work for securing students. It is a plain, earnest, and continuous effort to meet the needs of the people on their own farms and in the localities. ↗

— Liberty Hyde Bailey

#continuous #earnest #effort #exhortation #exploitation

I was inspired more by early Bette Midler. I do wear a fancy dress and very high heels - and extra high hair. My goal is to obliterate all earnestness. ↗

— Ana Gasteyer

#dress #early #earnestness #extra #fancy