Famous Quotes By George Bernard Shaw

Famous Quotes By George Bernard Shaw

1. A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
2. A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
3. A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
4. A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
5. A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.
6. A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
7. A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
8. A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
9. Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
10. All great truths begin as blasphemies.
11. All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
12. An index is a great leveller.
13. Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.
14. Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
15. Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
16. Beauty is all very well at first sight but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
17. Beware of false knowledge it is more dangerous than ignorance.
18. Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
19. Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
20. Clever and attractive women do not want to vote they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
21. Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
22. Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
23. Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
24. Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
25. Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
26. First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
27. Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.
28. Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
29. Hell is full of musical amateurs.
30. He's a man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
31. Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
32. I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
33. I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
34. I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
35. I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
36. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.
37. I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.
38. If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
39. If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
40. If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.
41. If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
42. If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
43. I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
44. Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
45. In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.
46. It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
47. It is most unwise for people in love to marry.
48. It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
49. It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.
50. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
51. Lack of money is the root of all evil.
52. Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
53. Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire the other is to get it.
54. Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
55. Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
56. Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.
57. Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
58. Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
59. Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
60. Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
61. Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
62. Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.
63. Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
64. Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.
65. Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.
66. My reputation grows with every failure.
67. Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.
68. No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
69. Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.
70. Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
71. Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
72. One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
73. Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
74. Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.
75. Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
76. Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
77. Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
78. Power does not corrupt men fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
79. Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
80. Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.
81. She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
82. Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
83. Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
84. The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.
85. The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
86. The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
87. The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
88. The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.
89. The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
90. The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
91. The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
92. The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.
93. The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
94. The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.
95. The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
96. The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
97. The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
98. The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.
99. There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
100. There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
101. There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
102. There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
103. Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
104. Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die do not outlive yourself.
105. We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
106. We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
107. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
108. We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
109. What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?
110. What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
111. When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.
112. When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.
113. Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
114. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
115. You use a glass mirror to see your face you use works of art to see your soul.
116. You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
117. Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.