George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone upon stone, a palace.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

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

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

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

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

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.

Opera is when a tenor and soprano want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman's pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.

There are two things necessary to Salvation.... Money and gunpowder.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching.

Better never than late.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

I have found, after a good deal of consideration, that the best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for Him here.

God help England if she had no Scots to think for her.

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

We are the living graves of murdered beasts.

It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.

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

Christmas is forced upon a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

Music is the brandy of the damned.

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

All young women begin by believing they can change and reform the men they marry. They can't.

Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen.

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?

If all the statisticians in the world were laid head to toe, they wouldn't be able to reach a conclusion

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

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

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

The truth is the one thing that nobody will believe.