George Bernard Shaw Quotes
-
Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.
-
To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.
-
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.
-
Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
-
The only way in which a nation can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and allowing no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities have been thoroughly served.
-
Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work. But this means that they do not live like rich people at all, and might therefore just as well have ordinary incomes.
-
I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.
-
You will think less of the art, when you know the artist...
-
Every girl has a right to be loved.
-
We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing.
-
Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
-
The person I miss most is the one I could have been.
-
Most people go to their grave with their music inside them.
-
We must reform society before we can reform ourselves.
-
I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.
-
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
-
The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.
-
When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.
-
You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.
-
The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.
-
Religion is a good invention in times of stress.
-
Education can and should do much influence social, moral and intellectual discovery by stimulating critical attitudes of thought in the young
-
People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.
-
Take the utmost care to get well born and well brought up.