We may smile at these matters, but they are melancholy illustrations.
You can only be funny if you have matters of great importance on your mind.
The #MeToo movement is insanely serious, and there's no comedy to be mined out of that.
Those who are serious in ridiculous matters will be ridiculous in serious matters.
I'm with the president nearly every day. We engage in complex conversations about some of the most weighty matters facing the world. I deliver to him this exquisite product that's been developed by my officers. He engages in a way that shows his understanding of the complexity. He asks really hard questions. He delivers policy outcomes based on the information that we provide him. My observation of the president is that, we deal in serious matters.
Jokes aside, let us turn to serious matters.
We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.
Is there anyone to whom you entrust a greater number of serious matters than your wife? And is there anyone with whom you have fewer conversations?
Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. Government is too serious a matter to admit of meaningless courtesies.
When it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
If there is anything serious enough to make a difference in my ife, I will talk about it.
I like to make fun of serious matters.
There's always something to think about in terms of problems that are dark and important and immediate and scary.
Jest not with the eye or with Religion.
That's the Irish all over -- they treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke.
I want to talk about things that are actually important.
It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.
Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.
A grave aspect to a grave character is of much more consequence than the world is generally aware of; a barber may make you laugh, but a surgeon ought rather to make you cry.
An Englishman does not joke about such an important matter as a bet.
As for jest, there are certain things which ought to be privileged from it; namely, religion, matters of state, great persons, any man's present business of importance and any case that deserveth pity.
1st Baron Verulam
When curiosity turns to serious matters, it's called research.
A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.
Eyes and Priests Bear no Jests.
