George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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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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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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The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
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Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?
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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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Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?
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The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.
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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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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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Your heart and your mouth will be in two separate parts of your body if you again forget in whose presence you stand.
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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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How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?
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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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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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My reputation grows with every failure.
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Who is this Baby Ruth? And what does she do?
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The truth is the one thing that nobody will believe.
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Any belief worth having must survive doubt...
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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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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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The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
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If Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters.
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There is only one universal passion fear.