George Bernard Shaw Quotes - Page 5

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.

A great devotee of the gospel of getting on.

What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

My dear: in this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.

Virtue consists not in abstaining from vice but in not desiring it.

The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

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.

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

I work as my father drank.

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

The philosopher is Nature's pilot - and there you have our difference to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

Woman's dearest delight is to wound Man's self-conceit though Man's dearest delight is to gratify hers.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

Loyalty in a critic is corruption.

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses.

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.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

All professions are a conspiracy against the country.

The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older.

Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

This is the true joy in life the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap.

As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy withwhich we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live,including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are.Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing—a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.