200+ Quotes & Sayings By George Bernard Shaw

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. George Bernard Shaw

You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not? George Bernard Shaw

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it. George Bernard Shaw

While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: "To ----, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw."He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw. George Bernard Shaw

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. George Bernard Shaw

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. George Bernard Shaw

You may remember that on earth–though of course we never confessed it–the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them. George Bernard Shaw

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. George Bernard Shaw

The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless. George Bernard Shaw

..Hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, “Make me a healthy animal.” But here you escape this tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, “the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on.. George Bernard Shaw

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. George Bernard Shaw

Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent. George Bernard Shaw

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them. George Bernard Shaw

My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacr . George Bernard Shaw

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds. George Bernard Shaw

That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and stealstheir affection from her. George Bernard Shaw

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. George Bernard Shaw

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another. George Bernard Shaw

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time. George Bernard Shaw

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

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius. George Bernard Shaw

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most. George Bernard Shaw

Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only “frail.” They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all: liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls. George Bernard Shaw

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. George Bernard Shaw

[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature. George Bernard Shaw

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

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. George Bernard Shaw

Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is? George Bernard Shaw

Hell is full of musical amateurs. George Bernard Shaw

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain? George Bernard Shaw

Lack of money is the root of all evil. George Bernard Shaw

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices. George Bernard Shaw

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself. George Bernard Shaw

Well, what do they all amount to, these kings and captains and bishops and lawyers and such like? They just leave you in the ditch to bleed to death; and the next thing is, you meet them down there, for all the airs they give themselves. George Bernard Shaw

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us! George Bernard Shaw

Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true. George Bernard Shaw

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

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire. George Bernard Shaw

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years. George Bernard Shaw

The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out. George Bernard Shaw

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. George Bernard Shaw

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. George Bernard Shaw

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death. George Bernard Shaw

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. George Bernard Shaw

MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins: youre tempting the girl. It’s not right. She should think of the future. H I G G I N S. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you havnt any future to think of. George Bernard Shaw

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means. George Bernard Shaw

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning. George Bernard Shaw

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. George Bernard Shaw

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile. George Bernard Shaw

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. George Bernard Shaw

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels. George Bernard Shaw

There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things." Henry Higgins, Act V, Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw

HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man? D O O L I T T L E [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me. George Bernard Shaw

The problem with communication…is the illusion that is has been accomplished. George Bernard Shaw

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

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity. George Bernard Shaw

I know your head aches. I know you're tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher's window. But think what you're trying to accomplish - just think what you're dealing with. The majesty and grandeur of the English language; it's the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds. And that's what you've set yourself out to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will. George Bernard Shaw