Famous quotes containing the word earnest:
“We are always on stage, even when we are stabbed in earnest at the end.”
—Georg Büchner (1813–1837)
“Columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mariner’s compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them. We are no nearer than Plato was. The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this New World always haunts the outskirts of his time, and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted, and, as it were, in a straight line.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They have been foolish enough to put at the end of all this earnest the old joke of a diploma. Let every sheep keep but his own skin, I say.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)