George Bernard Shaw Quotes

The philosopher is Nature's pilot.

First really like is just a little bit foolishness as well as a lot of curiosity. No actually self-respecting girl would reap the benefits of it.

Make me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that surely is a great and blessed invention.

My heart, my heart, be whole and free: Love is thine only enemy.

You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.

I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.

The pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments; its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry.

Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.

Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.

Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself.

Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.

A man's behaviour may be quite harmless and even beneficial, when he ismorally behaving like a scoundrel. And he may do great harm when he is morally acting on the highest principles.

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

Vitality is a woman is a blind fury of creation.

Somemenare bornkings; and someare bornstatesmen. The two are seldom the same.

No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.

Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow.

As 99 per cent of English authors and 100 per cent of American ones [authors] are just such imbeciles, managers and publishers make a practice of asking for every right the author possesses.

Stimulate the phagocytes.

HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man? DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.

The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.

Of the two lots, the woman's lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man's of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man's.

Why not give Christianity a trial?

O Lord! I don't know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do.

Whenever I see the word Operation, especially Trifling Operation, I at once write off the patient as dead.

You're only a beginner; and what you think is love, and interest, and all that, is not real love at all: three quarters of it is only unsatisfied curiosity.

Life's no brief candle-it's a splendid torch!

It is well to be off with the old woman before you're on with the new.

We have in England a curious belief in first-rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know.

Oh, the frontier of hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

I love little children too but I don't cut off their heads and stick them in vases.

It is the inefficiency and sham of ... our schools ... that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.

Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die.

Female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.

We must all share in the evils of the world or move to another planet.

A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

If you do not write for publication, there is little point in writing at all.

All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins?

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.

You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you? . . . If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.

Get married, but never to a man who is home all day.

Marriage is tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and dont expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear thinking about.

The politician who once had to learn to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.

If you say that God is good, great, blessed, wise or any such thing, the starting point is this : God is.

The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.