George Bernard Shaw - Man Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

View all George Bernard Shaw Quotes
The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.

George Bernard Shaw
A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.

George Bernard Shaw
The righteous man takes his life in his hand whenever he utters the truth.

George Bernard Shaw
A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

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

George Bernard Shaw
Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.

George Bernard Shaw
The last word remains with Christ and Handel; and this must stand as the best defence of Tolerance until a better man than I makes a better job of it.
Put shortly and undramatically the case is that a civilization cannot progress without criticism, and must therefore, to save itself from stagnation and putrefaction, declare impunity for criticism. This means impunity not only for propositions which, however novel, seem interesting, statesmanlike, and respectable, but for propositions that shock the uncritical as obscene, seditious, blasphemous, heretical, and revolutionary.

George Bernard Shaw
A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

George Bernard Shaw
My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God — nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?

George Bernard Shaw
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

George Bernard Shaw
There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.

George Bernard Shaw
When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind.

George Bernard Shaw
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

George Bernard Shaw
I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.

George Bernard Shaw
But for this very reason no doctor dare accuse another of malpractice. He is not sure enough of his own opinion to ruin another man by it.

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

George Bernard Shaw
It is easy—terribly easy— to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.

George Bernard Shaw
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

George Bernard Shaw
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.

George Bernard Shaw
The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.

George Bernard Shaw
Perhaps woman's art is of woman's life a thing apart, 'tis man's whole existence; just as love is said to be the reverse — though it isn't.

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
Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.

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
'Do you know what a pessimist is?' 'A man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.'

George Bernard Shaw
Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

George Bernard Shaw
But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.

George Bernard Shaw
Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman.

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