George Bernard Shaw Quotes
-
If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side.
-
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
-
I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself.
-
Taking all the round of professions and occupations, you will find that every man is the worse for being poor; and the doctor is a specially dangerous man when poor.
-
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
-
I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.
-
A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
-
Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
-
I can't control what life did to me, but I can control how I react. Therein lies the difference.
-
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.Man
-
The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
-
A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings out its poetry, tragedy, or comedy.
-
Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone upon stone, a palace.
-
In a hospital they throw you out into the street before you are half cured, but in a nursing home they don't let you out till you are dead.
-
I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.
-
To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.
-
No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.
-
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
-
Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.
-
Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
-
A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.
-
My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion.
-
I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.
-
The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.