George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.

George Bernard Shaw
He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

George Bernard Shaw
A man who has no office to go to—I don't care who he is—is a trial of which you can have no conception.

George Bernard Shaw
Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

George Bernard Shaw
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

George Bernard Shaw
If you do things merely because you think some other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state of things.

George Bernard Shaw
Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich—something for nothing.

George Bernard Shaw
Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.

George Bernard Shaw
There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.

George Bernard Shaw
How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.

George Bernard Shaw
When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.

George Bernard Shaw
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

George Bernard Shaw
My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.

George Bernard Shaw
Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

George Bernard Shaw
The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people.

George Bernard Shaw
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; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

George Bernard Shaw
The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.

George Bernard Shaw
The notion that inspiration is something that happened thousands of years ago, and was then finished and done with... the theory that God retired from business at that period and has not been heard from since, is as silly as it is blasphemous.

George Bernard Shaw
An interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personalimportance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed.

George Bernard Shaw
Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion.

George Bernard Shaw
No child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.

George Bernard Shaw
When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content.

George Bernard Shaw
KNELLER: Just what such blockheads would believe. The circle is a dead thing like a straight line: no living hand can draw it: you make it by twirling a pair of dividers.

George Bernard Shaw
Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.

George Bernard Shaw
A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.

George Bernard Shaw