George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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

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

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life

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

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.. George Bernard Shaw

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.. George Bernard Shaw

Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance..

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

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

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

The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.. George Bernard Shaw

The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.

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

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

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.. George Bernard Shaw

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

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two;

You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the

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.

What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.. George Bernard Shaw

What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.. George Bernard Shaw

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

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.. George Bernard Shaw

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

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it....

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

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

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and

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.

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

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.

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

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

A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith.

The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing - a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

I could not find the exact wording but Shaw said instead of calling people whires and blacks, we should say browns and pinks.

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, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.

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

The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound.

The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

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

You may remember that on earth - though of course we never confessed it - the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.

Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.

If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.

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

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

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.

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. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.

La science est une nouvelle religion et la désinfection est son eau bénite.

The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

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

[As quoted in Literary Censorship in England (in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)]

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.

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

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

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

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

There is always danger for those who are afraid.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it....

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

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

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

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!

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.

War does not decide who is right but who is left.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all.

It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.

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

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.

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.

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

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.

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.

Youth is wasted on the young.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination

Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

COKANE [looking compassionately at him] Ah, my dear fellow, the love of money is the root of all evil.

LICKCHEESE. Yes, sir; and we’d all like to have the tree growing in our garden.

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.

MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins: youre tempting the girl. It’s not right. She should think of the future.
HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you havnt any future to think of.

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

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.

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