George Bernard Shaw Quotes (675 Quotes)



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

    It isn't mere convention. Everyone can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who don't are the wrong ones.

    A child hasn't a grown-up person's appetite for affection. A little of it goes a long way with them and they like a good imitation of it better than the real thing, as every nurse knows.

    What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.


    It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing.... It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

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

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

    You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.


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

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

    Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?

    Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.

    Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

    There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

    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.

    You sometimes have to answer to a woman according to her womanishness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly.

    The apparent multiplication of gods is bewildering at the first glance, but you soon discover that they are the same GOD. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible gods. In fact Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the most profound Methodist, and crudest idolater, are equally at home with it.


    All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.

    There was only one virtue, pugnacity only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.

    Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.



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

    Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world but you must get a man through his own religion, not through yours.


    The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

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

    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.

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

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



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

    There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.



    There are two classes in good society in England. The equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.



    When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn To the murder column and there we are rarely disappointed.



    The price of ability does not depend on merit, but on supply and demand.

    Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

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

    That is what all poets do they talk to themselves out loud and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.



    Related Authors


    Tennessee Williams - George Bernard Shaw - Richard Steele - Philippe Quinault - John Fletcher - Henry Taylor - Henry Porter - Hannah Cowley - George Colman - Alexandre Dumas


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