The universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest.

Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.

— George Bernard Shaw

“The antique volume which I had taken up was the “Mad Trist” of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favorite of…

— Edgar Allan Poe

Many wise words are spoken in jest, but they don't compare with the number of stupid words spoken in earnest.

— Sam Levenson

As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frog in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.

— Joanna Russ

The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.

— Annie Dillard

Speak not injurious words, neither in jest nor earnest. Scoff at none though they give occasion.

— George Washington

Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret,…

— Annie Dillard

The boys throw rocks at the frogs in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.

— Bion of Borysthenes

I don't believe that there is a human creature in his senses, arrived to maturity, that at some time or other has not been…

— Bernard de Mandeville

Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that remarkable capacity for awakening, that…

— Soren Kierkegaard

Speak not injurious words neither in jest nor earnest; scoff at none, although they give occasion.

— George Washington

We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

And truly it demands something god like in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images.…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson