All 15 Uses of
earnest
in
Hard Times
- Louisa would suspend the occupation of the moment, whatever it was, and look for the reply as earnestly as Sissy did.†
Chpt 1.9
- …he stood as he had stood all the time — his usual stoop upon him; his pondering face addressed to Mr. Bounderby, with a curious expression on it, half shrewd, half perplexed, as if his mind were set upon unravelling something very difficult; his hat held tight in his left hand, which rested on his hip; his right arm, with a rugged propriety and force of action, very earnestly emphasizing what he said: not least so when it always paused, a little bent, but not withdrawn, as he paused.†
Chpt 1.11
- 'That's enough for me,' she replied, with great earnestness and interest of manner.†
Chpt 1.12
- While looking at it, it was shut out from his view by the softened tears that filled his eyes; but not before he had seen how earnestly she looked at him, and how her own eyes were filled too.†
Chpt 1.13
- You are an affectionate, earnest, good young woman - and - and we must make that do.
Chpt 1.14 *earnest = sincere
- Strange as it always is to consider any assembly in the act of submissively resigning itself to the dreariness of some complacent person, lord or commoner, whom three-fourths of it could, by no human means, raise out of the slough of inanity to their own intellectual level, it was particularly strange, and it was even particularly affecting, to see this crowd of earnest faces, whose honesty in the main no competent observer free from bias could doubt, so agitated by such a leader.†
Chpt 2.4
- …worse than it might be; that every man considered it incumbent on him to join the rest, towards the making of it better; that every man felt his only hope to be in his allying himself to the comrades by whom he was surrounded; and that in this belief, right or wrong (unhappily wrong then), the whole of that crowd were gravely, deeply, faithfully in earnest; must have been as plain to any one who chose to see what was there, as the bare beams of the roof and the whitened brick walls.†
Chpt 2.4
- He spoke with the rugged earnestness of his place and character — deepened perhaps by a proud consciousness that he was faithful to his class under all their mistrust; but he fully remembered where he was, and did not even raise his voice.†
Chpt 2.5
- The not being troubled with earnestness was a grand point in his favour, enabling him to take to the hard Fact fellows with as good a grace as if he had been born one of the tribe, and to throw all other tribes overboard, as conscious hypocrites.†
Chpt 2.7
- And yet he had not, even now, any earnest wickedness of purpose in him.†
Chpt 2.8
- He said it earnestly, and to do him justice he had.†
Chpt 3.1
- He added in his mind, 'And you speak to him with the most confiding eyes I ever saw, and the most earnest voice (though so quiet) I ever heard.'†
Chpt 3.2
- The child-like ingenuousness with which his visitor spoke, her modest fearlessness, her truthfulness which put all artifice aside, her entire forgetfulness of herself in her earnest quiet holding to the object with which she had come; all this, together with her reliance on his easily given promise — which in itself shamed him — presented something in which he was so inexperienced, and against which he knew any of his usual weapons would fall so powerless; that not a word could he…†
Chpt 3.2
- She was so very earnest and injured, that Mr. Gradgrind, shocked by the possibility which dawned upon him, said in a gentler tone: 'Do you deny, then, madam, that you left your son to — to be brought up in the gutter?'†
Chpt 3.5
- By an earnest repetition of this entreaty, poured out in all the agony of such a moment, Sissy at last brought her to be silent, and to look at her with a tearless face of stone.†
Chpt 3.6
Definition:
-
(earnest) characterized by sincere belief
or:
intensely or excessively serious or determined