George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

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

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

George Bernard Shaw
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.

George Bernard Shaw
Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?

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

George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

George Bernard Shaw
The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

George Bernard Shaw
The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.

George Bernard Shaw
The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plains.

George Bernard Shaw
I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

George Bernard Shaw
To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.

George Bernard Shaw
Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

George Bernard Shaw
In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.

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
It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.

George Bernard Shaw
I make no vows. I take my chance. … It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.

George Bernard Shaw
I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.

George Bernard Shaw
The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions.

George Bernard Shaw
Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

George Bernard Shaw
The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.

George Bernard Shaw
I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it.

George Bernard Shaw
Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?

George Bernard Shaw
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.

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

George Bernard Shaw
If one will only take the precaution to go in long enough after it commences and to come out long before it is over you will not find it wearisome.
Of Gounod's La Rédemption

George Bernard Shaw
I am a woman of the world, Hector; and I can assure you that if you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just what you like.

George Bernard Shaw
Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

George Bernard Shaw