George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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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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There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.
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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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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.
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Two people getting together to write a book is like three people getting together to have a baby. One of them is superfluous.
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Education can and should do much influence social, moral and intellectual discovery by stimulating critical attitudes of thought in the young
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A child hasn't a grown-up person's appetite for affection. A little of it goes a long way with them; and they like a good imitation of it better than the real thing, as every nurse knows.
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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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The reasonable man will adjust to the demands of his environment. The unreasonable man expects his environment to adjust to his own needs. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
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The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.
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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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If you say that God is good, great, blessed, wise or any such thing, the starting point is this : God is.
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That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.
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People who are hard, grasping and always ready to take advantage of their neighbors become very rich.
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When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while to keep them.
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Every child has a right to its own bent. . . . It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father.
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What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
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There is nothing in religion but fiction.
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A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else.
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In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.
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Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
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The medieval doctors of divinity who did not pretend to settle how many angels could dance on the point of a needle cut a very poor figure as far as romantic credulity is concerned beside the modern physicists who have settled to the billionth of a millimetre every movement and position in the dance of the electrons. Not for worlds would I question the precise accuracy of these calculations or the existence of electrons (whatever they may be). The fate of Joan is a warning to me against such heresy.
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What we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.