George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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It is the highest creatures who take the longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity.
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What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.
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No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.
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I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.
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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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We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
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Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family.
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Woman reduces us all to the common denominator.
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I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.
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Vitality is a woman is a blind fury of creation.
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Taking all the round of professions and occupations, you will find that every man is the worse for being poor; and the doctor is a specially dangerous man when poor.
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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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Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich-something for nothing.
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Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.
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Life's no brief candle-it's a splendid torch!
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I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly feed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.
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A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings out its poetry, tragedy, or comedy.
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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.
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When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication.
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Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
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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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Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone upon stone, a palace.
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Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.
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The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.