George Bernard Shaw Quotes

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.

If any religion had a chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth?

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum

Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.

Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

He who has never hoped can never despair

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.

Experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last."

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.

This is the true joy of life-the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown to the scrap-heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances.

The 100% American is 99% idiot.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care of that.

The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

My reputation grows with every failure.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.

Go anywhere in England where there are natural wholesome, contented and really nice English people; and what do you find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich-something for nothing.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.

A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.

A man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.

Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman, he may pronounce as he pleases.

If you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy yourself there.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

The best bought-up children are those who have seen thier parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the first duty of a parent.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.

Success covers a multitude of blunders.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man'sto keep unmarried as long as he can.

Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it.

What is both surprising and delightful is that the spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game...There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability.

People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way.

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

Revolutionary moments attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.

Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse.

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.