C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Earnestness
Earnestness is the devotion of all the faculties.
Earnestness alone makes life eternity.
Time and pains will do anything.
Intense people are usually narrow-minded.
Earnestness and sincerity are synonymous.
Earnestness is the salt of eloquence.
The generous warmth that prompts to worthy deeds.
Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.
His heart was in his work, and the heart giveth grace unto every art.
There is no substitute for thoroughgoing, ardent, and sincere earnestness.
A man in earnest finds means, or, if he cannot find, creates them.
My God, help me always resolutely to strive, and, through life and death, to force my way unto Thee.
The earnestness of life is the only passport to the satisfaction of life.
Earnestness is needed in this world as much as any virtue.
Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great.
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give no peace.
Vigor is contagious; and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.
The most precious wine is produced upon the sides of volcanoes. Now bold and inspiring ideals are only born of a clear head that stands over a glowing heart.
Child of earth and earthly sorrows—child of God and immortal hopes—arise from thy sadness, gird up the loins of thy mind, and with unfaltering energy press toward thy rest and reward on high.
The shortest and surest way to prove a work possible is strenuously to set about it; and no wonder if that proves it possible that for the most part makes it so.
Earnestness commands the respect of mankind. A wavering, vascillating, dead-and-alive Christian does not get the respect of the church or the world.
A man without earnestness is a mournful and perplexing spectacle. But it is a consolation to believe, as we must of such a one, that he is the most effectual and compulsive of all schools.
I look upon enthusiasm in all other points but that of religion to be a very necessary turn of mind; as, indeed, it is a vein which nature seems to have marked with more or less strength in the tempers of most men.
He who would do some great thing in this short life, must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as to the idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity.
Without earnestness no man is ever great, or does really great things. He may be the cleverest of men; he may be brilliant, entertaining, popular; but he will want weight. No soul-moving picture was ever painted that had not in it depth of shadow.
Do you wish to become rich? You may become rich, that is, if you desire it in no half way, but thoroughly. A miser sacrifices all to his single passion; hoards farthings and dies possessed of wealth. Do you wish to master any science or accomplishment? Give yourself to it and it lies beneath your feet. Time and pains will do anything. This world is given as the prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world is truer still of the world to come.
Earnestness is the cause of patience; it gives endurance, overcomes pain, strengthens weakness, braves dangers, sustains hope, makes light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them.