George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
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What, or who, led you to take up photography, and about what date ? George Bernard Shaw – I always wanted to draw and paint. I had no literary ambition. I aspired to be a Michelangelo, not a Shakespeare. But I could not draw well enough to satisfy myself; and the instruction I could get was worse than useless. So when dry plates and push buttons came into the market I bought a box camera and began pushing the button. It was in 1898.
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Nowadays a parlor maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective.
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Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.
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It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
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I do not, like the Fundamentalists, believe that creation stopped six thousand years ago after a week of hard work. Creation is going on all the time.
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When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content.
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The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.
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When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.
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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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The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
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I have my own soul. My own spark of divine fire.
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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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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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Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.
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We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
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A married man is a man with a past, while a bachelor is a man with a future.
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No doubt it is easy to demostrate that property will destroy society unless society destroys it.
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Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.
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Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste in his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin.
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I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.
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The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.
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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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Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?