George Bernard Shaw Quotes

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

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.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

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

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

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

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.

Better never than late.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.

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.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

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.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

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.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

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.

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.