Seriousness Quotes

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Do you take anything seriously?”
“Not if I can help it. Makes life so tedious.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm

“You can’t be serious,” I said.
“Not on a regular basis, no.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm

“Can't you ever be serious?' I said, mortified.
'It's difficult,' he said. 'There's so little in life that's worth it.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“To sober up seems to many like making life “so serious,” as if seriousness precluded joy, warmth, spontaneity and fun. But there can be a delusional, blind quality to non-sober festivities. To have our eyes open soberly with all our senses and memory intact allows some of the most rewarding, soul-nourishing, and long-lasting pleasures possible.”
― Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence

“I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously."

[Writer’s Digest Interview (Robert Jacobs, Writer’s Digest, February 1976)]”
― Ray Bradbury

“I am so tired.
I have grown old from being serious.
I have grown ill from being serious.
I want to laugh at myself.
I want to forget myself.
I am so tired.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“One must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.”
― Oscar Wilde, John Cooper, The Importance of Being Earnest

“She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.”
― Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I like to prowl ordinary places.
I feel sorry for us all or glad for us
all
caught alive together
and awkward in that way.

there's nothing better than the joke
of us
the seriousness of us
the dullness of us”
― Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit

“It is easy to be solemn, it is so hard to be frivolous.”
― G K Chesterton

“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
― Nicholas Butler

“What, in all very seriousness, the hell was going on?”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.”
― G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered

“I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.”
― Roman Payne

“Albert Campion: 'I’m serious!'
Lugg: 'That’s unhealthy in itself.”
― Margery Allingham, Mystery Mile

“Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut

“Stop holding back those desires you've been too ashamed to admit.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“It is the tendency of deep feeling to subdue the manner rather than to render it too energetic.”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students

“This showed once again that everyone had something different to lose in this battle. Some were concerned for their lives, and some for those they cared most about: rays, sea horses, even the chickens that ran free in the streets of the city because they couldn't all be caught in time.”
― Kai Meyer, Pirate Wars

“But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who have aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse … I mean obviously Rothko.”
― John Logan, Red

“Those who are weak, never suck the blood of the enemy, as it is to be done with strength.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting, dangerous ideal to which we should not wish to persuade anybody because we do not readily concede the right to it to anyone: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively - that is, not deliberately but from overflowing power and abundance - with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for whom those supreme things that the people naturally accept as their value standards, signify danger, decay, debasement, or at least recreation, blindness, and temporary self-oblivion; the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often appear inhuman - for example, when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solemnity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody - and in spite of all of this, it is perhaps only with that great seriousness really begins, that the real question mark is posed for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“I touched my scalp where Sula had wrapped the cloth. It still burned, but it made me feel important. I'd been wounded in combat. Anyone could break a leg or dislocate a sholder, but how many people get shot? I could tell by the way Will was looking at me that he was impressed too and not a little bit jealous. I would have quickly traded the head wound, however, for a glass of clean water.”
― Cameron Stracher, The Water Wars

“It is human nature not to take things seriously until they become serious enough to prove that we should have taken them seriously before things got serious.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Hope Evermore: Quotes, Verse, & Spiritual Inspiration for Every Day of the Year

“Vera's monkey brain was "racing." She wanted someone to talk to her and to get some of her words out, but Daddy and the Seal had now switched to Russian and their conversation was growing more somber, because that's what Russian did to you. Her teacher, the other Vera, had never once smiled, even when reading the ostensibly funny book about a clumsy bear who failed to live by the complex rules of forest society and constantly needed to learn distsiplina (discipline) from his animal peers. "We can all use some more distsiplina," Teacher Vera would say. "It is what our vozhd"--or "leader"--"expects from us." Then she would show them the photograph of a man who looked like a sad but disciplined hamster in a suit in front of a tricolor flag.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Broadway is the opium of the masses”
― Art Sincere, From Butt to Butt: A Sweeping Romance for the Ages

“He only has two emotions: serious and serious as fuck, straight up.”
― Paul Beatty, Tuff

“The seriousness and focus you demonstrate when approaching a task offer not merely a hint of how successful you will be, but also concrete proof!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan