A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.

Oh, that ludicrous virile earnestness!

Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.

Every man is grave alone.

There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest, good men.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human.

Taking fun as simply fun and earnestness in earnest shows how thoroughly thou none of the two discernest.

There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.

Solemnity is the shield of idiots.

Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.