George Bernard Shaw Quotes

I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing authors and reviews, I sit on committees with capable practical greengrocers and bootmakers... Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.
George Bernard Shaw
It's all that the young can do for the old to shock them and keep them up to date.
George Bernard Shaw
Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
George Bernard Shaw
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity.
George Bernard Shaw
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
George Bernard Shaw
I work as my father drank.
George Bernard Shaw
When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure so I did ten times more work.
George Bernard Shaw
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
George Bernard Shaw
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
George Bernard Shaw
The fickleness of the woman I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard Shaw
Woman's dearest delight is to wound Man's self-conceit though Man's dearest delight is to gratify hers.
George Bernard Shaw
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.
George Bernard Shaw
Virtue consists not in abstaining from vice but in not desiring it.
George Bernard Shaw
All great truths began as blasphemies.
George Bernard Shaw
My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
George Bernard Shaw
I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
George Bernard Shaw
One man who has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
George Bernard Shaw
The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.
George Bernard Shaw
Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.
George Bernard Shaw
He who can does. He who can't teaches.
George Bernard Shaw
Success covers a multitude of blunders.
George Bernard Shaw
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
George Bernard Shaw
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.
George Bernard Shaw
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: wlien the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
George Bernard Shaw
If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman he may pronounce as he pleases.
George Bernard Shaw
A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid.
George Bernard Shaw
Englishmen never will be slaves they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.
George Bernard Shaw
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
George Bernard Shaw
I believe in the discipline of silence and could talk for hours about it.
George Bernard Shaw
We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us ashamed of ourselves of our relatives of our incomes of our accents of our opinion of our experience just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
George Bernard Shaw
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them make them.
George Bernard Shaw
Self-control is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.
George Bernard Shaw
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
George Bernard Shaw
If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy it there.
George Bernard Shaw
Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.
George Bernard Shaw
Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.
George Bernard Shaw
Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world but you must get at a man through his own religion not through yours.
George Bernard Shaw
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
A great devotee of the gospel of getting on.
George Bernard Shaw
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
George Bernard Shaw
Most people do not pray they only beg.
George Bernard Shaw
What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattery.
George Bernard Shaw
Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.
George Bernard Shaw
He knows nothing he thinks he knows everything - that clearly points to a political career.
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
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
A pessimist? A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself and hates them for it.
George Bernard Shaw
Parentage is a very important profession but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interests of the Children.
George Bernard Shaw
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parents' first duty.
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
Our laws make law impossible our liberties destroy all freedom our property is organized robbery our morality an impudent hypocrisy our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes our power wielded by cowards and weaklings and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.
George Bernard Shaw
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard Shaw
A day's work is a day's work neither more nor less and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance a night's repose and due leisure whether he be painter or ploughman.
George Bernard Shaw
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
George Bernard Shaw
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
George Bernard Shaw
From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way.
George Bernard Shaw
As long as I have a want I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
George Bernard Shaw
If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy it there.
George Bernard Shaw
Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.
George Bernard Shaw