George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
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I had not achieved a success; but I provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again.
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Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you treat fortune tellers.
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The stock actor is a stage calamity...
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Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it.
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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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I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot.
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Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
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All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.
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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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I have my own soul. My own spark of divine fire.
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It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.
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We are not taught to think decently on sex subjects, and consequently we have no language for them except indecent language.
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Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.
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The only person who acts sensibly is my tailor. He takes my measure anew every time he sees me. Everyone else goes by their old measurements.
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Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.
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Though the Life Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads.
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Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.
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You have no right to say that I am not sincere. I have found a happiness in art that real life has never given me. I am intensely in earnest about art. There is is a magic and mystery in art that you know nothing of.
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While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
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The fact is that the intrinsic worth of the book, play or whatever the author is trying to sell is the least, last factor in the the whole transaction.
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If pity is akin to love, gratitude is akin to the other thing.
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The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
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If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.