George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.
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If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.
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A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.
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There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.
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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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I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.
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Experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.
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Woman's happiness begins with her first love and ends about then...
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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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A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.
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My reputation grows with every failure.
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Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.
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I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren't married.
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Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.
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Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.
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Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.
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A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.
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What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care of that.
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Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measuresby results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice.
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If in the library of your house you do not have the works of the ancient Greek writers, then you live in a house with no light.
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What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?
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The only power a god can teach is the power of doing without happiness.
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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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Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.