George Bernard Shaw famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Islam is the best religion and Muslims are the worst followers
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth - beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals - would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
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.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Liberty is the breath of life to nations.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
I believe in the discipline of silence, and could talk for hours about it.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
A mind of the caliber of mine cannot derive its nutrient from cows.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman's work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
All progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Activity is the only road to knowledge.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
I have studied him - the wonderful man - and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ he must be called the saviour of humanity.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
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.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Emotional excitement reaches men through tea, tobacco, opium, whisky, and religion.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
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.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
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.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
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.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Most people do not pray; they only beg.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
It is most unwise for people in love to marry.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
My reputation grows with every failure.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
-- George Bernard Shaw
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