#earnest

I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out. ↗

— Helen Fielding

#bridget #bridget jones #caribbean #cruises #earnest

To practice five things under all circumstances constitutes perfect virtue; these five are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness. ↗

— Confucius

#constitutes #earnestness #five #generosity #gravity

I think because I am as earnest as I am, people were accepting of my evolving into a certified, legitimate, and grown up and I did take three years off. ↗

— Claire Danes

#am #because #certified #did #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

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

— Samuel Johnson

#time

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

— Mindy Kaling

#earnestness #face #face value #media #people

About my career I was serious and earnest, sometimes impatient. ↗

— Gene Tierney

#career #earnest #i #impatient #serious

Laurence Olivier said in an interview once that when he plays a tragedy he always aims for the funny parts, and the other way around. Because in a comedy you look for what's serious. I think that's true. Sometimes things are really funny if you're absolutely earnest. If you're really serious, it's hilarious. ↗

— Christopher Walken

#aims #always #around #because #comedy

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