George Bernard Shaw - Life Quotes

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

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

George Bernard Shaw
Fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.

George Bernard Shaw
You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.

George Bernard Shaw
Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.

George Bernard Shaw
Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

George Bernard Shaw
I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

George Bernard Shaw
PATIOKIM: In Russia we face facts.
EDSTATON: In England, sir, a gentleman never faces any fact if they are unpleasant facts.
PATIOKIM: In real life, all facts are unpleasant.

George Bernard Shaw
The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

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
Life is too short for men to take it seriously.

George Bernard Shaw
Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.

George Bernard Shaw
In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine.

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
Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.

George Bernard Shaw
The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing.

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
I don't want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill…I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioner and say every 5 years or every 7 years…just put them there and say, 'Sir or madam will you be kind enough to justify your existence…if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little bit more then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive. Because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself.'

George Bernard Shaw
Life is a flame that is always burning itself out; but it catches fire again every time a child is born.

George Bernard Shaw
Human affection…is the one great curse of mankind, the principal obstruction to its progress. Take myself, for instance; all my life affection has been showered on me, and everything that I have done I have had to do in spite of it.

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
Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things.

George Bernard Shaw
Without danger I cannot be great. That is how I pay for Abel's blood. Danger and fear follow my steps everywhere. Without them courage would have no sense. And it is courage, courage, courage that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.

George Bernard Shaw
Nothing remains beautiful and interesting except thought, because the thought is the life.

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
Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.

George Bernard Shaw
Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.

George Bernard Shaw
Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

George Bernard Shaw