Really to sin you have to be serious about it.

Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.

: You have to be serious if you want to be in love. </br> : You have to be serious about crime if you want to afford to be in love.

Speak truth.

About what matters.

Say it well.

Although I express myself with some degree of pleasantry, the purport of my words is entirely serious.

It takes courage to say what has to be said.

Some need to be told that what the Government does isn’t a game, it’s a serious business that has real consequences for people’s lives.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

That's the nub of the thing, you see — seriousness of spirit. It doesn't mean heaviness of heart, or a lack of fantasy, but it does mean an awareness of influences that touch our lives, sometimes in ways that seem cruel and unfeeling, and sometimes in ways that open up a glory which can never be forgotten.

When it becomes serious, you have to lie.

On the whole, you could say that if you are defending your opinions, you are not serious. Likewise, if you are trying to avoid something unpleasant inside of yourself, that is also not being serious. A great deal of our whole life is not serious. And society teaches you that. It teaches you not to be very serious – that there are all sorts of incoherent things, and there is nothing that can be done about it, and that you will only stir yourself up uselessly by being serious. But in a dialogue you have to be serious. It is not a dialogue if you are not – not in the way I’m using the word. There is a story about Freud when he had cancer of the mouth. Somebody came up to him and wanted to talk to him about a point in psychology. The person said, “Perhaps I’d better not talk to you, because you’ve got this cancer which is very serious. You may not want to talk about this.” Freud’s answer was, “This cancer may be fatal, but it’s not serious.” And actually, of course, it was just a lot of cells growing. I think a great deal of what goes on in society could be described that way – that it may well be fatal, but it’s not serious.

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

“We must say the truth”.

America this is quite serious