George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous.
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Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.
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In the right key one can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part is the establishment of the key.
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Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.
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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.
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Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.
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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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People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them.
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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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Go on writing plays, my boy, One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, "Is there a play from Shaw this morning?" and when she says, "No," he will say, "Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish." And that's your chance, my boy.
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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.
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When you prevent me from doing anything I want to do, that is persecution; when I prevent you from doing anything you want to do, that is law, order, and morals.
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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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How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?
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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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Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?
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Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?
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Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
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Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.
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Any belief worth having must survive doubt...
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My reputation grows with every failure.
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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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The truth is the one thing that nobody will believe.
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The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.