George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

George Bernard Shaw
I worship you, Eve. I must have something to worship. Something quite different to myself, like you. There must be something greater than the snake.

George Bernard Shaw
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

George Bernard Shaw
If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

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

George Bernard Shaw
We have in England a curious belief in first-rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know.

George Bernard Shaw
I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

George Bernard Shaw
There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.

George Bernard Shaw
The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.

George Bernard Shaw
Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.

George Bernard Shaw
The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.

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. Life is no brief candle for me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

George Bernard Shaw
It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.

George Bernard Shaw
The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.

George Bernard Shaw
Our natural dispositions may be good; but we have been badly brought up, and are full of anti-social personal ambitions and prejudices and snobberies. Had we not better teach our children to be better citizens than ourselves? We are not doing that at present. The Russians are. That is my last word. Think over it.

George Bernard Shaw
There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.

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
Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.

George Bernard Shaw
The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy.

George Bernard Shaw
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.

George Bernard Shaw
There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

George Bernard Shaw
The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.

George Bernard Shaw
I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.

George Bernard Shaw
Well, sir, you never can tell. That's a principle in life with me, sir, if you'll excuse my having such a thing, sir.

George Bernard Shaw
You have no right to say that I am not sincere. I have found a happiness in art that real life has never given me. I am intensely in earnest about art. There is is a magic and mystery in art that you know nothing of.

George Bernard Shaw
You sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanliness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly.

George Bernard Shaw
Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family.

George Bernard Shaw
No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Caesar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare.

George Bernard Shaw
Swindon: What will history say?
Burgoyne: History, sir, will tell lies as usual.

George Bernard Shaw
There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.

George Bernard Shaw