LORD ILLINGWORTH. Quite serious, Mr. Kelvil. [To MRS. ALLONBY.] Vulgar habit that is people have nowadays of asking one, after one has given them an idea, whether one is serious or not. Nothing is serious except passion. The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.英文原著 · 《A Woman of No Importance》
Ho, ho!" He laughed gibingly. It was a masterful laugh. "A serious play with a cross-eyed man doing funny stuff all through. I thought it was serious, did I? Yes, I did!" Again the dry, scornful laugh of superiority. "Didn't you people know that I knew what I could do and what I couldn't do? I should have thought that little thing would of occurred to you all the time. Didn't you s'pose I knew as well as any one that I got a low-comedy face and couldn't ever make the grade in a serious piece?英文原著 · 《Merton of the Movies》
So much the better! Indeed one cannot expect a young girl (looking at Franziska in a marked manner) to treat a serious matter with serious people in a serious manner.英文原著 · 《Minna von Barnhelm》
Everybody wore a serious look. Inside of myself I felt pretty serious too--serious enough for ten or twelve. I had meant to fling off several very bright, spontaneous quips on the way to the table. I thought them out in advance, but now, somehow, none of them seemed appropriate. Instinctively, as it were, I felt that humor was out of place here.英文原著 · 《Speaking of Operations》
"I'd like a man that has lightness of mind. Serious people bore one so after a while." By "serious people" she meant one serious person whom she had admired particularly for his seriousness. But she was in another mood now, another atmosphere--the atmosphere she had breathed since she was thirteen, except in the brief period when her infatuation for Scarborough had swept her away from her world.英文原著 · 《The Cost》
Whoever, in reading "Vathek," takes it altogether seriously, does not read it as it was written. We must have an eye for the vein of caricature that now and then comes to the surface, and invites a laugh without disturbing the sense of Eastern extravagance bent seriously upon the elaboration of a tale crowded with incident and action. Taken altogether seriously, the book has faults of construction. But the faults turn into beauties when we catch the twinkle in the writer's eye.英文原著 · 《The History of Caliph Vathek》