George Bernard Shaw Quotes (675 Quotes)

He's a man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

Schools must not become the agencies through which propaganda advocated by any section of society is spread. The method of control always a crucial problem should be in harmony with the fundamental values and principles of the states and the entire e

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house that is the true middle-class unit.

I flatly declare that a man fed on whisky and dead bodies cannot do the finest work of which he is capable

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

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

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

Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole, arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness found by mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly vitality.

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.

I've been offered titles, but I think they get one into disreputable company.

Medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common curemongering witchcraft.

Science is always simple and profound. It is only half truths that are dangerous.

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

Dear Sir, Your profession has, as usual, destroyed your brain.

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

Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.

I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow's feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong.

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

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

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.

Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid of.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

The chief objection of playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player

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

In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject. I hope it may prove successful.

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.

An index is a great leveller.

Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place.

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

Do not love your neighbour as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence if on bad, an injury.

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages. . .

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

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

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

LORD NORTHCLIFFE. The trouble with you, Shaw, is that you look as if there were famine in the land. G. B. S. The trouble with you, Northcliffe, is that you look as if you were the cause of it.

People must not be forced to adopt me as their favourite author, even for their own good.

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

The only person who behaves sensibly is my tailor. He takes my measure anew every time he sees me. All the rest go on with their old measurements.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.

I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it woul.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

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

Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can't blame them for that, can you.

I am a gentleman I live by robbing the poor.

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

It's a funny thing about that bust. As time goes on it seems to get younger and younger.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.

Common people do not pray they only beg.