George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.

George Bernard Shaw
The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.

George Bernard Shaw
It's prudent to gain the whole world and lose your own soul. But don't forget that your soul sticks to you if you stick to it; but the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.

George Bernard Shaw
The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.

George Bernard Shaw
But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.

George Bernard Shaw
No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.

George Bernard Shaw
How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

George Bernard Shaw
Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you treat fortune tellers.

George Bernard Shaw
Women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men.

George Bernard Shaw
What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.

George Bernard Shaw
No doubt it is natural to a snail to think that any evolution which threatens to do away with shells will result in general death from exposure.

George Bernard Shaw
O Lord! I don't know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do.

George Bernard Shaw
The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

George Bernard Shaw
No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

George Bernard Shaw
He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him

George Bernard Shaw
Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor: not even a poor employer or a poor landlord.

George Bernard Shaw
Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.

George Bernard Shaw
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

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

George Bernard Shaw
I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.

George Bernard Shaw
When a prisoner sees the door of his dungeon open, he dashes for it without stopping to think where he shall get his dinner outside.

George Bernard Shaw
A love affair should always be a honeymoon. And the only way to make sure of that is to keep changing the man; for the same man can never keep it up.

George Bernard Shaw
The test to which all methods of treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not.

George Bernard Shaw
If Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters.

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
The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.

George Bernard Shaw
I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, ininvention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.

George Bernard Shaw
Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good.

George Bernard Shaw
Your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!

George Bernard Shaw
Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.

George Bernard Shaw