George Bernard Shaw Quotes on Life (40 Quotes)

Life is not meant to be easy, my child, But take courage, It can be delightful.

If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. . . . It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarf's in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.

The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.

Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind and indeed cannnot endure it. . . . Happiness is not the object of life life has no object it is an end in itself. . .

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.

There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.

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

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.

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

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

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

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

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

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

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

Well, sir, you never can tell. Thats a principle in life with me, sir, if youll excuse my having such a thing.

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and youre driving at another.

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.

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

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

Vice is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy Are the canonical vices.

This is the true joy in life being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creator's hand. In the face of an Indian, you can see the natural glory of life, while we have covered ourselves with an artificial cloak.

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

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

He didn't dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life.

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

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

Life is a disease and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis I am always in the convalescent stage.

Life is a flame that is always burning itself out, but it catches fire again every time a child is born

If all you are going to do in life are the things that are convenient and comfortable, the great things never get done.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

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.

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

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

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

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.