George Bernard Shaw Quotes (675 Quotes)


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


    The great secret is not having bad manners or good manners or having 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 and one soul is as good as another.


    To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God's hand, his brain as God's brain, his purpose as God's purpose.


    They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this ... because ... I am a natural-born mountebank.


    In the arts of life man invents nothing but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.


    A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavour to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

    Under exciting circumstances, wealth cannot be enjoyed without dishonor, or foregone without misery.


    When a man wants to murder a tiger, it's called sport when the tiger wants to murder him it's called ferocity.


    When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind

    The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

    Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.


    But that was how it was in a workaday Britain generally addicted to merit, rather than one increasingly enslaved to notions of entitlement. In the deepest part of themselves, all classes now are devoted to leisure, as if proper and difficult occupation has become one of the enemies of modern selfhood. The secret of being miserable, ... is to have leisure to bother whether you are happy or not.

    The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.

    Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit that he was a first-rate political economist.

    The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.... It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman despise him.

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


    If a woman rebels against high-heeled shoes, she should take care to do it in a very smart hat.

    If Pygmalion, is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary.

    A man learns to skate by staggering about making a fool of himself indeed, he progresses in all things by making a fool of himself.

    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.

    I am very sorry, but I cannot learn languages. I have tried hard, only to find that men of ordinary capacity can learn Sanskrit in less time that it takes me to buy a German Dictionary

    I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

    Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

    With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not ever Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.

    I assume that to prevent illness in later life, you should never have been born at all.

    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.



    The man who listens to Reason is lost Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

    The most striking result of our present system of farming out the national land and capital to private individuals has been the division of society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme, and large dinners no appetit

    And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.

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

    Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all crimes.

    Affection between adults - if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown up children - and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural.




    As long as more people will pay admission to a theater to see a naked body than to see a naked brain, the drama will languish

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



    Manners are more important than laws and upon them, to a great deal, the law depends.


    Related Authors


    William Shakespeare - Oscar Wilde - George Bernard Shaw - Richard Steele - John Fletcher - Jean Racine - Hannah Cowley - George Colman - Anton Chekhov - Alexandre Dumas


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