Earnestness Quotes - Page 3

• The best convent for a woman is the seclusion of her own home. There she may find her vocation and fight her battles, and there she may learn the reality and the earnestness of life.

  Elizabeth Prentiss

  Home, Fighting, Reality

  Elizabeth Prentiss (1871). “Stepping Heavenward. By the author of 'The flower of the family'.”, p.235

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• We should always pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God; we should always act with as much energy as those who expect everything from themselves.

  Charles Colson

  Prayer, Energy, Praying

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• 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.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Moving, Heart, Ties

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• In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into.

  Carl Jung

  World, Kind

  Carl Gustav Jung, Meredith Sabini (2002). “The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C.G. Jung”, p.33, North Atlantic Books

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• Great grief prays with great earnestness. Prayer is not a collection of balanced phrases; it is the pouring out of the soul. What is love if it be not fiery? What are prayers if the heart be not ablaze? They are the battles of the soul. In them men wrestle with principalities and powers...
  ”The prayer that prevails is not the work of lips and fingertips. It is the cry of a broken heart and the travail of a stricken soul.

  Samuel Chadwick

  Prayer, Grief, Heart

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• Thinking it selfish to dwell on her own sufferings, when in the midst of wretches, who had not only lost all that endears life, but their very selves, her imagination was occupied with melancholy earnestness to trace the mazes of misery, through which so many wretches must have passed to this gloomy receptacle of disjointed souls, to the grand source of human corruption.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Selfish, Thinking, Imagination

  Mary Wollstonecraft (2012). “Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman”, p.18, Courier Corporation

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• The way of awakening and freedom requires that we ask ourselves, with all of the earnestness, honesty, and humility at our command, just this one fundamental question: 'Am I willing to live this moment with as much attention and affection as possible, or am I going to do something else?'

  Scott Morrison

  Life, Honesty, Humility

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• 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.

  Vidya Balan

  Children, Honesty, Self

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• Here's the thing about earnestness. Our culture discounts it; but people are yearning for it.

  Jeffrey Zaslow

  People, Culture, Yearning

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• Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that remarkable capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Profound, Together, Different

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• Earnestness is the most important thing.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Important, Important Things

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• 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.

  John Calvin

  Prayer, Fasting, Worship

  John Calvin (2013). “Commentary on Luke”, p.88, Ravenio Books

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

  Randy Pausch

  Trying, Hips, Surface

  Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow (2008). “The last lecture”, Hyperion Books

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• I admired the earnestness of these people, many of whom had joined Greenpeace and marched for noble things in their youth. But I didn’t share their hatred of the establishment. After all, the establishment had given me so many of my favorite things: Nick at Nite, the New York Knicks, Stephen King, Taco Bell, Green Day. The list went on and on.

  Simon Rich

  Kings, New York, People

  "Ridiculously Rich: The Rumpus Interview With Simon Rich". Interview with Maureen Miller, therumpus.net. June 9, 2010.

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• 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.

  Todd Haynes

  Ideas, Trying, Culture

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children... during an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.

  William Tecumseh Sherman

  Children, Men, Soldier

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• 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.

  George Saunders

  Book, Fall, Writing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There's not a lot of room for un-ironic emotion in contemporary culture. I think that irony is an important tool in dealing with the world as we find it. It's a tool of protection, but it can also be a tool of incision to get to some truth. But along the way maybe we've lost some of what I think of as the power of straightforward emotion and earnestness and seriousness.

  John Green

  Thinking, Ironic, Important

  "Q&A: John Green & Nat Wolff on ‘Paper Towns’ Themes, Inside Jokes, Nicknames". Interview with Seth Kelley, variety.com. July 19, 2015.

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• Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness.

  Charles Dickens

  Inspirational, Opportunity, Men

  Charles Dickens (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Dickens (Illustrated)”, p.4820, Delphi Classics

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

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Religious, Art, Kind

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• [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.

  Albert Einstein

  Responsibility, Reality, Thinking

  Albert Einstein (2017). “Einstein on Peace”, p.274, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• You make adjustments according to the specifics of the character.It's something I feel like a lot of my comedic heroes have always done. It's not even necessarily vulnerability, always, but it's an earnestness, a genuine desire to actually do the right thing, but then still make really misguided, stupid decisions along the way.

  Ed Helms

  Stupid, Hero, Character

  Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. June 3, 2009.

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• 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.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Book, Thinking, Long

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• We should seek to free the moral life from the embarrassments and entanglements in which it has been involved by the quibbles of the schools and the mutual antagonisms of the sects; to introduce into it an element of downrightness and practical earnestness; above all, to secure to the modern world, in its struggle with manifold evil, the boon of moral unity, despite intellectual diversity.

  Felix Adler

  Struggle, School, Diversity

  "Life and Destiny". Book by Felix Adler, 1903.

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• 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

  Christian, Belief, Converting

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