George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
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Men trifle with their business and their politics but never trifle with their games. It brings truth home to them. They cannot pretend they have won when they have lost nor that they had a magnificent drive when they foozled it. The Englishman is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.
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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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My opportunities were still there, nay, they multiplied tenfold; but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail, and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.
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The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy.
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The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.
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Without danger I cannot be great. That is how I pay for Abel's blood. Danger and fear follow my steps everywhere. Without them courage would have no sense. And it is courage, courage, courage that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.
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What's the use of money if you have to earn it.
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If you do things merely because you think some other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state of things.
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The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.
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Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.
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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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All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
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The best way to get your point across is to entertain.
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A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.
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The function of comedy is to dispelunconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysisright on to it.
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New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.
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Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
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Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.
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A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
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Hypocrisy ... is only bad when it is improperly used.
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I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everybody there looks an original. All other nations are obviously mass produced.
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The capacity of any conqueror is more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary.
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Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?Making life means making trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things.