George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication.
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I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.
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Happiness and Beauty are by-products.
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Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
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In truth , mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true : what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.
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Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.
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Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
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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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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.
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The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.
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You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'
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Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.
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I fought linotype and montype for some time because it would not justify as well as handset could be made to do; but at last, as always happens, the machine outdid the hand, and got all the best types on it.
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Of the two lots, the woman's lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man's of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man's.
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Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.
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This planet is obviously being used as an insane asylum by other planets.
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An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.
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Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.
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I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
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Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one. Telegram inviting Winston Churchill to opening night of Pygmalion. Churchill wired back: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second - if there is one.
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Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
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All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
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From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way.
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Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.