#sincerity

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart. ↗

— Fred Allen

#fly #fruit #heart #hollywood #navel

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#novelty #originality #sincerity

Without feeling abashed by my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit, that of perfect sincerity. ↗

— Jean Henri Fabre

#absolutely #am #answer #appearance #confess

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death. ↗

— Albert Camus

#death #efforts #men #only #seriousness

I write about wounds, the eternal treasons of life. It's not very funny, but it's sincere. My commitment is to sincerity. ↗

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

#commitment #eternal #funny #i #i write

One reason why the Enemy found this so easy was that, without knowing it, I was already desperately anxious to get rid of my religion; and that for a reason worth recording. By a sheer mistake - and I still believe it to have been an honest mistake - in spiritual technique I had rendered my private practice of that religion a quiet intolerable burden. It came about in this way. Like everyone else I had been told as a child that one must not only say one's prayers but think about what one was saying. Accordingly, when I came to a serious belief, I tried to put this into practice. At first it seemed plain sailing. But soon the false conscience (St. Paul's 'Law', Herbert's 'prattler') came into play. One had no sooner reached 'Amen' than it whispered, 'Yes. But are you sure you were really thinking about what you said?'; then, more subtly, 'Were you, for example, thinking about it as well as you did last night?' The answer, for reasons I did not then understand, was nearly always No. 'Very well,' said the voice, 'hadn't you, then, better try it over again?' And one obeyed; but of course with no assurance that the second attempt would be any better...I set myself a standard. No clause of my prayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a 'realization,' by which I meant a certain vivedness of the imagination and the affections. My nightly task was to produce by sheer will power a phenomenon which will power could never produce, which was so ill-defined that I could never say with absolute confidence whether it had occurred, and which, even when it did occur, was of very mediocre spiritual value. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#belief #prayer #satan #sincerity #imagination

I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust. ↗

— Queen Elizabeth II

#i #life #many #mine #my life

Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism. ↗

— George Henry Lewes

#independence #originality #rebellion #sincerity

You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real. ↗

— Thomas Bernhard

#artists #artists-life #insincerity #pretention #art

My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other? ↗

— Jane Austen

#inter-relationship #sincerity #truth #beauty