George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist. Here we have shared George Bernard Shaw quotes on love, life, happiness, death, democracy, communication, circumstances, unreasonable man, inspirational, and motivational.
George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, in Portobello, Dublin, Ireland, and died on November 2, 1950, in Ayot Saint Lawrence, United Kingdom. His wife’s name Charlotte Payne-Townshend.
George Bernard Shaw quotes
The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them. – George Bernard Shaw
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. – George Bernard Shaw
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it. – George Bernard Shaw
I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. – George Bernard Shaw
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. – George Bernard Shaw
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. – George Bernard Shaw
The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react. – George Bernard Shaw
England and America are two countries separated by the same language. – George Bernard Shaw
You see things, and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were, and I say ‘Why not?’ – George Bernard Shaw
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time. – George Bernard Shaw
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. – George Bernard Shaw
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it. – George Bernard Shaw
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. – George Bernard Shaw
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. – George Bernard Shaw
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. – George Bernard Shaw
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. – George Bernard Shaw
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world. – George Bernard Shaw
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience? – George Bernard Shaw
Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life. – George Bernard Shaw
The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people. – George Bernard Shaw
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. – George Bernard Shaw
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. – George Bernard Shaw
Frederick Douglass Quotes On Life
You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul. – George Bernard Shaw
There is no sincerer love than the love of food. – George Bernard Shaw
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. – George Bernard Shaw
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. – George Bernard Shaw
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. – George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. – George Bernard Shaw
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get. – George Bernard Shaw
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. – George Bernard Shaw
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. – George Bernard Shaw
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. – George Bernard Shaw
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. – George Bernard Shaw
Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open. – George Bernard Shaw
When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any. – George Bernard Shaw
The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things. – George Bernard Shaw
Hell is full of musical amateurs. – George Bernard Shaw
The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post. – George Bernard Shaw
If I were a woman, I’d simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I’d got the vote. – George Bernard Shaw
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses. – George Bernard Shaw
My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion. – George Bernard Shaw
Independence? That’s middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. – George Bernard Shaw
Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. – George Bernard Shaw
Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious. – George Bernard Shaw
Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt. – George Bernard Shaw
I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile. – 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 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. – 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. – 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
The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic. – George Bernard Shaw
Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself. – George Bernard Shaw
My reputation grows with every failure. – George Bernard Shaw
What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car? – 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
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it. – George Bernard Shaw
Property is organized robbery. – George Bernard Shaw
All great truths begin as blasphemies. – George Bernard Shaw
If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion. – George Bernard Shaw
He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. – George Bernard Shaw
I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community. – George Bernard Shaw
If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it. – George Bernard Shaw
A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic. – George Bernard Shaw
Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire. – George Bernard Shaw
I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me. – George Bernard Shaw
Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. – 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
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them. – George Bernard Shaw
The love of the economy is the root of all virtue. – George Bernard Shaw
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t. – George Bernard Shaw
In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present. – George Bernard Shaw
An assassination is an extreme form of censorship. – George Bernard Shaw
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t! – George Bernard Shaw
Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. ‘A miracle a minute’ would not be a bad slogan for God. – George Bernard Shaw
Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it. – George Bernard Shaw
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. – George Bernard Shaw
If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do. – George Bernard Shaw
Better never than late. – George Bernard Shaw
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. – George Bernard Shaw
The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. – George Bernard Shaw
Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. – George Bernard Shaw
I want to be all used up when I die. – George Bernard Shaw
If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters. – George Bernard Shaw
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means. – George Bernard Shaw
Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare. – George Bernard Shaw
I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence. – 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
The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. – George Bernard Shaw
Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it. – George Bernard Shaw
An index is a great leveler. – George Bernard Shaw
A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out. – George Bernard Shaw
The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else. – George Bernard Shaw
Every man over forty is a scoundrel. – George Bernard Shaw
The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. – George Bernard Shaw
Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course. – George Bernard Shaw
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. – George Bernard Shaw
We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. – George Bernard Shaw
If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs, and good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it. – George Bernard Shaw
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. – George Bernard Shaw
The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office. – George Bernard Shaw
The natural term of the affection of the human-animal for its offspring is six years. – George Bernard Shaw
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. – George Bernard Shaw
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad. – George Bernard Shaw
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. – George Bernard Shaw
In this world, there is always danger for those who are afraid of it. – George Bernard Shaw
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity. – George Bernard Shaw
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men. – George Bernard Shaw
I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for – scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself. – George Bernard Shaw
A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes. – George Bernard Shaw
Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive. – George Bernard Shaw
A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold. – George Bernard Shaw
All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it. – George Bernard Shaw
Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage. – George Bernard Shaw
Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability. – George Bernard Shaw
The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself. – George Bernard Shaw
Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. – George Bernard Shaw
It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters anymore. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace. – George Bernard Shaw
We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money. – George Bernard Shaw
Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. – George Bernard Shaw
The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy. – George Bernard Shaw
I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad. – George Bernard Shaw
No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious. – George Bernard Shaw
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation. – George Bernard Shaw
The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel. – George Bernard Shaw
The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business. – George Bernard Shaw
In heaven, an angel is nobody in particular. – George Bernard Shaw
I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist. – George Bernard Shaw
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days? – George Bernard Shaw
It is most unwise for people in love to marry. – George Bernard Shaw
Most people do not pray; they only beg. – George Bernard Shaw
You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race. – George Bernard Shaw
He who can do. He who cannot, teaches. – George Bernard Shaw
General consultant to mankind. – George Bernard Shaw
Syllables govern the world. – George Bernard Shaw
Peace is not only better than war but infinitely more arduous. – George Bernard Shaw
Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness. – George Bernard Shaw
Very few people can afford to be poor. – George Bernard Shaw
Lack of money is the root of all evil. – George Bernard Shaw
Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious. – George Bernard Shaw
There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it. – George Bernard Shaw
The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about like a celestial Rough Rider! – 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
Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population. – George Bernard Shaw
I’m an atheist and I thank God for it. – George Bernard Shaw
A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation – or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays – is like a blind man’s dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place. – George Bernard Shaw
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it. – George Bernard Shaw
The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation. – George Bernard Shaw
The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of man. – George Bernard Shaw
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth? – George Bernard Shaw
The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor. – George Bernard Shaw
Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends. – George Bernard Shaw
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell. – George Bernard Shaw
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. – George Bernard Shaw
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else. – George Bernard Shaw
Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid. – George Bernard Shaw
Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own. – George Bernard Shaw
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough. – George Bernard Shaw
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads. – George Bernard Shaw
An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it. – George Bernard Shaw
You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live. – George Bernard Shaw
If women were particular about men’s characters, they would never get married at all. – George Bernard Shaw
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. – George Bernard Shaw
The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong. – George Bernard Shaw
People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them. – 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
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. – George Bernard Shaw
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier. – George Bernard Shaw
Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have a social conscience are at the mercy of those who have none. – George Bernard Shaw
There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot. – George Bernard Shaw
The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life. – George Bernard Shaw
Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children. – George Bernard Shaw
Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English. – George Bernard Shaw
Life would be tolerable but for its amusements. – George Bernard Shaw
You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub. – George Bernard Shaw
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. – George Bernard Shaw
A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint about a man in London if he has a comfortable income. – George Bernard Shaw
Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us. – George Bernard Shaw
Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him. – George Bernard Shaw
Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me. – George Bernard Shaw
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness. – George Bernard Shaw
Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force. – George Bernard Shaw
If you injure your neighbor, better not do it by halves. – George Bernard Shaw
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time. – George Bernard Shaw
The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake as the rich man. – George Bernard Shaw
The art of government is the organization of idolatry. – George Bernard Shaw
I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy. – George Bernard Shaw
Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power. – George Bernard Shaw
It’s easier to replace a dead man than a good picture. – George Bernard Shaw
In a battle, all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood, and the knowledge that it’s more dangerous to lose than to win. – George Bernard Shaw
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying. – George Bernard Shaw
Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent. – George Bernard Shaw
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty. – George Bernard Shaw
It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics. – George Bernard Shaw
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America. – George Bernard Shaw
In the Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person. – George Bernard Shaw
What is a virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married? – George Bernard Shaw
The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not. – George Bernard Shaw
Homelife is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo. – George Bernard Shaw
The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me. – George Bernard Shaw
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience. – George Bernard Shaw
No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect. – George Bernard Shaw
Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilization in a country where there is plenty of lands available for private appropriation by the last comer. – George Bernard Shaw
I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality. – George Bernard Shaw
I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage, he is at least safe from people. – George Bernard Shaw
Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love. – George Bernard Shaw
Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long. – George Bernard Shaw
It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right. – George Bernard Shaw
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech. – George Bernard Shaw
All genuinely intellectual work is humorous. – George Bernard Shaw
Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes. – 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
She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech. – George Bernard Shaw
We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be. – George Bernard Shaw
Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world. – George Bernard Shaw
When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work. – George Bernard Shaw
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable. – George Bernard Shaw
Virtue is an insufficient temptation. – George Bernard Shaw
If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example. – George Bernard Shaw
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week. – George Bernard Shaw
The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves. – George Bernard Shaw
If you’re not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little 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
If you enjoy George Bernard Shaw quotes please feel free to share this post with your friends.
