34 Seriousness Quotes

Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.

No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.

He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene, But with his keener eye The axe's edge did try.

[Malipiero's advice to Casanova.] If you want to make people laugh, your face must remain serious.

The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

MANKIND: 'Rock, what I'm about to do is show the millions--' THE ROCK: (Rock holds out his hand to stop Mankind) 'Don't you EVER do that again.' LAWLER: 'Gimmick infringement!'

There can be - there ought to be - no medium course; a love-affair is either sober earnest or contemptible folly, if not wickedness: to gossip about it is, in the first instance, intrusive, unkind, or dangerous; in the second, simply silly. ~ Ch. 8

Life is a game, the first rule of which is that IT IS NOT A GAME.

Yet Dafydd's humour does not obscure, any more than Chaucer's does, the underlying seriousness of his poetry. Behind his poems of requited and unrequited love, whether idyllic or idealizing, whether streaked by savage jealousy or a profound feeling of betrayal reminiscent of Troilus and Criseyde, there runs a sense of the cruel impermanence of the world.

I am more and more convinced that taking life over-seriously is a frivolous thing. There is an affected self-dramatizing in the brooding over one's prospects and destiny. The trifling attitude of an Ecclesiastes is essentially sober and serious. It is in closer touch with the so-called eternal truths than are the most penetrating metaphysical probing and the most sensitive poetic insights.

Nice philosophy May tolerate unlikely arguments, But heaven admits no jest.

Good comedy is never frivolous. It's based on human experience, on human adventure, on human feelings. So it has to be profound.

For God's sake, sit down. You look like a Calvinist rector telling his flock about Hell.

I remember when hard-core first became commonplace, and there were discussions about what it would be like if a serious director ever made a porn movie. The answer, judging by Anatomy of Hell, is that the audience would decide they did not require such a serious director after all.

No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; - 'living in a vain show.' Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.

He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet.

Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without difficulty for he has always been comic for serious reasons. He has his own, almost romantic sense of propriety.

You still think this is a gigglefest private son of a bitch?!

Deemest thou labor Only is earnest? Grave is all beauty, Solemn is joy.

With the possible exception of What's Up, Tiger Lily (1966), the schlocky Japanese spy movie to which he attached his own, sidesplitting English soundtrack, no Woody Allen movie has ever been more or less serious than another of his works. He's always been serious. It's the audiences who have been frivolous. In Zelig he reassures us that he can still be funny and moving without making the sort of insistent filmic references in which he delights but which can be infuriating to others. Zelig is a nearly perfect - and perfectly original - Woody Allen comedy.

There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

Being solemn has almost nothing to do with being serious, but on the other hand, you can't go on being adolescent forever, unless you are in the performing arts, and anyhow most people can't tell the difference. In fact, though Americans talk a great deal about the virtue of being serious, they generally prefer people who are solemn over people who are serious. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like General Eisenhower. This is probably because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, especially in politics, but comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is as commonplace as jogging. Jogging is solemn. Poker is serious. Once you grasp that distinction, you are on your way to enlightenment.