George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
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An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.
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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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Every Englishman believes that Handel now occupies an important position in heaven. If so, le bon Dieu must feel toward him very much as Louis Treize felt toward Richelieu.
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The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.
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Martyrdom is the only path to immortality that requires no talent whatsoever.
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The person who is ignorant enough to believe that his nourishment depends on meat is in a horrible dilemma.
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A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.
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The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
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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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I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.
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Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
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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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The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.
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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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If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman's pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.
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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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There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
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Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.
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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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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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The stock actor is a stage calamity...
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When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.