George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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It has taken me nearly twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public; and I am not sure that I am not still regarded as a suspicious character in some quarters.
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To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.
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Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
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We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
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A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
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Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone upon stone, a palace.
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The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.
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Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich-something for nothing.
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No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.
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Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.
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I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum...
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I can't control what life did to me, but I can control how I react. Therein lies the difference.
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Men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.
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Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think.
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Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.
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Vitality is a woman is a blind fury of creation.
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We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
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My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion.
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I'm sick of all the reasonable people: they see all the reasons for doing nothing...
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What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
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I worship you, Eve. I must have something to worship. Something quite different to myself, like you. There must be something greater than the snake.
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Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
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A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
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What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.