Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. - Oscar Wilde
Maturity consists in having rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play. - Friedrich Nietzsche
Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle. - G.K. Chesterton
One of the things that kills Buddhist spiritual life is excessive seriousness. - Gil Fronsdal
Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been. - David Halberstam
Playfulness, dear friends, is what manifests love. Love is not manifested through serious survivability, seriousness, stabilility. Love, the essence of love, manifests itself through playfulness. - Réné Gaudette
Concentration is a powerful force, it is the mark of seriousness that attracts certain energies to complete your half-done work. - Michael Bassey Johnson
Humor and seriousness can be an unstable mix. - Richard Brookhiser
For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. - Jonathan Lethem
Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living. - Seán O'Casey
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. - Heraclitus
It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort. - Joyce Carol Oates
He (Mario Vargas Llosa) looks grave, transported. And there, I think, is the personality that wrote the books: one in which a subversive comic sense and appetite for the ridiculous jostle with an intense, statesmanlike seriousness about the business of being alive. - Tim Martin