George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something.
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Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.
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Fine art is the only teacher except torture.
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Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
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I like to quote myself frequently and often, it makes me sound much more intelligent than I actually am.
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War can so easily be gilt with romance and heroism and solemn national duty and patriotism and the like by persons whose superficial literary and oratorical talent covers an abyss of Godforsaken folly.
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I do not know what I think until I write it.
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I never accepted a knighthood because to me, is honour enough?
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Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.
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Those who are looking for paradise on Earth should come and see Dubrovnik.
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Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.
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Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.
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Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.
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This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
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No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
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We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
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Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
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The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.
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I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like the state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
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You know, Tolstoy, like myself, wasn't taken in by superstitions like science and medicine.
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Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions.
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All industries are brought under the control of such people [film producers] by Capitalism. If the capitalists let themselves be seduced from their pursuit of profits to the enchantments of art, they would be bankrupt before they knew where they were. You cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art.
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Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.
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There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.