George Bernard Shaw Quotes: 48

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

• There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

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

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

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

• She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

• A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

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

  Back to Methuselah

• If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

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

• 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.

  Man and Superman

• First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

• The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.

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

  Man and Superman

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

  Immaturity

• There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

  Man and Superman

• 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.

  Getting Married

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

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

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

  John Bull's Other Island

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

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

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

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

  Back to Methuselah

• 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.

  Androcles and the Lion

• What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.

  Pygmalion

• 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)]

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

  Man and Superman

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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....

  Music in London

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

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

  Major Barbara

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

  Candida

• 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.

  Misalliance

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

• The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination

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

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

• 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.

  Saint Joan

• 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.

  Misalliance

• Science never solves a problem without creating ten more

• The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound.The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

• 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.

• Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.