Top 100 Most Serious Quotes
#1. Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned scholars, those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of professional or pious duty, can often manage to evade a radically involved dialogue with the book they are questioning.
Thomas Merton
#2. You know," he (Tweedledee) added very gravely, "it's one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle
to get one's head cut off." pg. 199
Lewis Carroll
#3. The best way to make the most serious point in the world is to be as unserious as possible.
Mika.
#4. Most scientists will get serious media exposure about twice in their entire career. And they'll get that because they've actually done an experiment that was interesting.
Aubrey De Grey
#5. When we seek to escape from inner conflict and pain, we are running away from unresolved childhood trauma or original pain. Most people with serious addictive natures who are in the process of recovery have found that trauma played a huge role in escalating their addictions. It certainly did for me.
Christopher Dines
#6. The pope-and we know this well-is without doubt the most serious obstacle on the ecumenical road.
Pope Paul VI
#7. I would say of characters I've created, the one I've felt the most connected to emotionally was Adam Austin from 'The Prophet.' I think it was the connection to the idea that one decision you make innocently enough can have very serious, drastic consequences for someone else's life.
Michael Koryta
#8. When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.
Seth
#9. What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks 'the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,'.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come.
Maya Angelou
#10. TV serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion.
Neil Postman
#11. My philosophy is that all stocks are bad. There are no good stocks unless they go up in price. If they go down instead, you have to cut your losses fast Letting losses run is the most serious mistake made by most investors.
William O'Neil
#12. My mum was critical in getting me to recognise very early on that although what I was doing was pretty serious, quite selfish, and probably to most people pretty obsessive, there actually was more to life than running quickly twice round a track.
Sebastian Coe
#13. Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination.
Oscar Wilde
#14. The bars could not hold me. Force could not control me. They tried to keep me down, but Jah put I around. Yes, I've been accused. Wrongly abused. But through the powers of the Most High, they've got to turn me loose.
Bob Marley
#15. I was playing when I invented the aqualung. I think play is the most serious thing in the world.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
#16. I can always tell when you're thinking about food. You forget to be the Serious Wolf and you get this dreamy look in your eyes. You know, most people would think you were thinking about a girl. They have no idea that her name is bacon.
Ilona Andrews
#17. Most of the kids that I meet in the street are serious hardened criminals that I meet in the street, never had a mother and a father to love them, to protect them, to teach them right from wrong and lead them out of crime and gangs and stuff like that.
Steven Seagal
#18. Anyone who is serious about jiu-jitsu should know that the ability to defeat an opponent is nothing more than a metaphor for the ultimate combat, for the most significant victories are the ones we accomplish within ourselves
Rorion Gracie
#19. Cinderella was the first fairy tale I remember - the one I was most obsessed with because of the gowns and magic and pretty shoes. Yes, her home life was less than ideal - and considering the talking mice and birds, she probably needed serious therapy.
Cindi Madsen
#20. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.
Robert Lowell
#21. Politics has become a game of meaningless, mindless battles, conducted by unscrupulous methods and people, designed to transform even the most serious policy debates into sport.
Al Gore
#22. All I did in Chicago was to exercise my legal right to speak on my own behalf and I was given four years in jail as a result. But I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a black man to get a jury of his peers.
Bobby Seale
#23. At the time we're stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It's not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.
Stephen King
#24. There is but one nation on the globe from which we have anything serious to apprehend, but that is the most powerful that now exists or ever did exist. I refer to Great Britain.
John C. Calhoun
#25. I was pretty well through with the subject. At one time or another I had probably considered it from most of its various angles, including the one that certain injuries or imperfections are a subject of merriment while remaining quite serious for the person possessing them.
Ernest Hemingway,
#26. I'm working seven days a week in the fall. I couldn't possibly keep that up. This is only for the fall. In the last couple of years I've tended to do most of my serious writing in the winter, when there's nothing going on with football.
Gregg Easterbrook
#27. One of the most stinging criticisms made against Christians is that their minds are narrow and their hearts small. This may not be wholly true, but that such a charge can be made at all is sufficient cause for serious heart searching and prayer.
A.W. Tozer
#28. We've been a country that's been fortunate to be protected by two oceans, to not have serious attacks on our territory for most of our history. And we were unfortunately reminded in a very devastating way of our vulnerability.
Condoleezza Rice
#29. With your votes you are working for your future. It is not a holiday; it is the most serious day of work since you were born. Better to come in clothing dirty from work than with your soul filthy from having sold your right to justice.
Luis Munoz Marin
#30. Even on the most serious ballads, I'll throw in a tongue-in-cheek remark.
Brad Paisley
#31. Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.
Wendell Berry
#32. Most people believe that schools were good enough when they were children and that they are good enough now. But the dynamic growth of our system of education has spawned serious problems of educational quality.
Diane Ravitch
#33. I commit to most things I do in life, so I don't really have any serious regrets. But I'll say this: There are plenty of people that I wish I could un-meet. It's kind of an L.A. syndrome.
Sasha Grey
#34. Most of our country's serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism.
Walter E. Williams
#36. A serious pacifist approach can't win wars against enemies whose only program is violence. That doesn't mean I think the US has fought terrorists so wisely most of the time since 9/11. But there are some enemies that need to be destroyed by force lest they destroy much much more.
Philip Gourevitch
#37. Silicon Valley is constantly saying that the government is irrelevant and powerless. But that's because most people there have never seen it get serious.
Dan Farmer
#38. Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.
William S. Burroughs
#39. Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism.
David Suzuki
#40. This is by far the most serious crisis civilisation has ever faced.
Al Gore
#41. I understood that assisted conception was the antithesis of careless, spontaneous or unplanned parenthood, that it was the most deliberate of decisions, undertaken only by women who were serious and dedicated in their quest to be mothers.
Gail Honeyman
#42. The most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history and from the community. Colonization usurps any free role in either war or peace, every decision contributing to his destiny and that of the world, and all cultural and social responsibility.
Albert Memmi
#43. And religion causes most of the problems, war, and economics of course, and study your history or you're going to repeat it; and if you're burning a Harry Potter book you need some serious counseling, you don't get it, you're missing the whole point.
Michael Berryman
#44. Sex is the most respectable and holy thing in all creation, the most serious act in life.
George Sand
#45. The other, more serious problem associated with cosmetic surgery is that conventional treatments often give people a very unnatural, blank, or stretched look. Wiping all the character from a person's face is the most profound form of identity theft I can imagine.
Marie-Veronique Nadeau
#46. You know the phrase 'Jesus laughed' isn't ever used in the Gospels. So, most people walk away with the idea that Jesus is a pretty serious guy, pretty sour faced most of the time, pretty upset at what's going on around Him.
John Eldredge
#47. I am reminded of one of my father's novels, The Era of Hopeful Monsters. It was about a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment.
Kurt Vonnegut
#48. Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best. Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him.
Ayelet Waldman
#49. I learned to pray out of desperation. For most of us, this is how the adventure usually begins. When we finally get serious about prayer, the trigger is usually desperation, not duty ... We don't pray because we ought, we pray because we are without any other recourse.
David Jeremiah
#50. The most serious dangers for American freedom and the American way of life do not come from without.
Ludwig Von Mises
#51. The most serious film can be the most fun. The one that's supposed to be fun can be the most serious.
Eric Bana
#52. Do you think it's a coincidence that college is when many Americans do their most serious fucking and falling-down drinking and generally ecstatic DIonysian-type reveling? It's not.
David Foster Wallace
#53. The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
Virginia Woolf
#54. Of all the biennials, triennials, quadrennials, internationals, and massive group shows, Documenta, established in 1955 and held once every five years in Kassel, Germany, is seen as the most serious. A statement show.
Jerry Saltz
#55. Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#56. I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.
Chaim Potok
#57. Galatians 5:21 constitutes the most serious warning to those who may think they can sin that grace may abound.
Billy Graham
#58. For the advice in a joke is sometimes more useful than the most serious teaching.
Baltasar Gracian
#59. The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator.
Pope Paul VI
#60. For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.
Michel De Montaigne
#61. If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable.
Emil Cioran
#62. Perhaps the most serious complaint you could make about Bach is that he has every quality of humanity except imperfection.
Jeremy Denk
#63. Justifying conscription to promote the cause of liberty is one of the most bizarre notions ever conceived by man! Forced servitude, with the risk of death and serious injury as a price to live free, makes no sense.
Ron Paul
#64. Most women file for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious medical problem, a job loss, or a family break up. It is hard to protect against those.
Elizabeth Warren
#65. Thus one of Europe's most serious crises will be ended, and all of us, not only in Germany but those far beyond our frontiers, will then in this year for the first time really rejoice at the Christmas festival. It should for us all be a true Festival of Peace.
Adolf Hitler
#66. There was almost general consent over the fact that the application of the Christ spirit and practice to the everyday life was the serious thing. It required a knowledge of Him and an insight into His motives that most of them did not yet possess.
Charles M. Sheldon
#67. Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.
Aaron Copland
#68. I think the producers, for the most part, don't want to see prices skyrocket because that will only create problems for them down the road and would also be a, you know, would be a very serious shock for a world economy that can't afford serious shocks right now.
Daniel Yergin
#69. Animals that we eat are raised for food in the most economical way possible, and the serious food producers do it in the most humane way possible. I think anyone who is a carnivore needs to understand that meat does not originally come in these neat little packages.
Julia Child
#70. I think a lot of people are getting more serious about how to do the most good, but there is no road map. I'm hoping I can offer an example.
Mohnish Pabrai
#71. She hated to admit that money was the most serious difficulty. Knowing full well that it was important, she nevertheless rebelled at the unalterable truth that it could influence her actions, block her desires. A sordid necessity to be grappled with.
Nella Larsen
#72. There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.
Nick Harkaway
#73. We all use texting as a crutch because it's so easy and it doesn't really stop our day for the most part but I think to assure a woman you want to go out, to see that you're serious, you take the extra effort to pick up the phone and make a phone call.
Michael B. Jordan
#74. I believe man-made climate change is one of the most serious threats that this country and this world face.
David Cameron
#75. They think I'm depressed because I look serious in photos. It's usually because I'm just nervous. But I've stopped dressing for other people. If I think I look good, that's the most important thing.
Rose Byrne
#76. Money has been the most serious handicap that we have ever met. There are times when poverty is fortunate
Clarence Darrow
#78. Most Americans said teaching was a hard and important job, but many of them, including teachers and teaching professors, didn't seem to believe it required serious intellectual heft.
Amanda Ripley
#79. It is my belief, you cannot deal with the most serious things in the world unless you understand the most amusing.
Winston Churchill
#80. Everything can be made fun of. The most serious things are ripe for making fun of them.
Jim Carrey
#81. Most social acts have to be understood in their setting and lose meaning if isolated ... No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.
Solomon Asch
#82. Even today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn't be poor.
Muhammad Yunus
#83. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.
Henry David Thoreau
#84. Most television shows are going to require an actor sign up from four to six years, but an anthology show really amounts to five or six months at the most. I thought serious actors might be attracted to that.
Nic Pizzolatto
#85. This may not be the most serious problem in the world, but it is a familiar one: How do you divide a piece of cake equally between two children and also make sure that each of them sees it as a fair division?
Eric Maskin
#86. I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.
Paul Theroux
#87. The most serious parody I have ever heard was this: In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#88. Suicide is a crime - the only crime that, if successful, guarantees that the perpetrator will not be punished for it. This makes it the most serious crime of all.
Joanne Greenberg
#89. To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#90. For the most part our grassroots members are serious, nice, tolerant people.
Francis Maude
#91. If police officers routinely issue tickets for the most serious traffic offenses, they'll be treating drivers of all races, sexes, and ages equally.
Bill Dedman
#92. Know about the appeals process, especially in the case of the most serious crimes.
Marilyn Vos Savant
#93. Smiles, like humor, are the most serious and complex forms of communication used by human beings.
Gayle Pemberton
#94. Marriage is the most serious long-term contract a couple will make in their lifetime, but many enter into it with a lack of maturity and knowledge. The growing number of divorces shows how imperative it is that young people be adequately prepared for marriage.
Billy Graham
#95. It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.
Michel De Montaigne
#96. The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.
Milton Friedman
#97. That was what they did with themselves, those two Gracelings, along with a small band of friends: They stirred up trouble on a serious scale - bribery, coercion, sabotage, organized rebellion - all directed at stopping the worst behavior of the world's most seriously corrupt kings.
Kristin Cashore
#98. Recent surveys of Church members have shown a serious erosion in the number of families who have a year's supply of life's necessities. Most members plan to do it. Too few have begun ... It is our sacred duty to care for our families, including our extended families.
Thomas S. Monson
#99. One of the most serious human defects in all ages is procrastination, an unwillingness to accept personal responsibilities now.
Spencer W. Kimball
#100. The most serious thing, and the strangest, is that we are afraid to the point of panic, not so much of seeing ourselves as of being seen by ourselves. This is our root absurdity. What is behind this great fear?
Rene Daumal
