George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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What is the use of straining after an amiable view of things, when a cynical view is most likely to be the true one?
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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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The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary. rather tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise.
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We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
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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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When a bishop at the first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock round the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically... but that does not justify him in pretending...that Christ is, in effect, Mars.
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Happiness and Beauty are by-products.
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It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
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Your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!
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Life is a constant becoming: all stages lead to the beginning of others.
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People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.
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Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.
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We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.
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Though justice be Thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy.
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Defeatism is the wretchedest of policies.
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It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.
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Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.
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Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.
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I am the most spontaneous speaker in the world because every word, every gesture, and every retort has been carefully rehearsed.
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Pothinus: "Is it possible that Caesar, the conqueror of the world, has time to occupy himself with such a trifle as our taxes?" Caesar: "My friend, taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.
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Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.
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The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
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Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
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If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.