Top 1385 Quotes & Sayings by George Bernard Shaw - Page 20

Female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.

Life's no brief candle-it's a splendid torch!

No child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.

I love little children too but I don't cut off their heads and stick them in vases.

If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

As long as you don't fly openly in the face of society, society doesn't ask any inconvenient questions; and it makes precious short work of the cads who do. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you area red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!

Let not the right side of your brain know what the left side doeth.

A man has no business to marry a woman who can't make him miserable. It means she can't make him happy.

You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter;but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!

If you do not write for publication, there is little point in writing at all.

We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time; or we shall stick in the mud.

You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.

Whenever I see the word Operation, especially Trifling Operation, I at once write off the patient as dead.

All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins?

All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport - in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign policy.

The ability to make witty observations is commonly refered to as "cynism" by people who lack it.

Why not give Christianity a trial?

Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die.

Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.

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

In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.

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

The practical question, then, is what to do with the children. Tolerate them at home we will not. Let them run loose in the streets we dare not until our streets become safe places for children, which, to our utter shame, they are not at present, though they can hardly be worse than some homes and some schools.

You're only a beginner; and what you think is love, and interest, and all that, is not real love at all: three quarters of it is only unsatisfied curiosity.

Nationalism must now be added to the refuse pile of superstitions. We are now citizens of the world, and the man who divides the race into elect Irishmen and reprobate foreign devils (especially Englishmen) had better live on the Blaskets where he can admire himself without disturbance.

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses.

Every girl has a right to be loved.

The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.

It's just as unpleasant to get more than you bargain for as to get less.

Once the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible, we crucified it.

We must all share in the evils of the world or move to another planet.

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.

Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste in his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin.

It is in the hour of trial that a man finds his true profession.

Oh, the frontier of hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you? . . . If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.

The person who is ignorant enough to believe that his nourishment depends on meat is in a horrible dilemma.

Not until he acquires European manners does the American anarchist become the gentleman who assures you that people cannot be mademoral by Act of Parliament (the truth being that it is only by Acts of Parliament that men in large communities can be made moral, even when they want to).

If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.

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

It is the inefficiency and sham of ... our schools ... that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.

The shot Irishmen will now take their places beside Emmet and the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland, and beside the heroes of Poland and Sérbia and Belgium in Europe; and nothing in heaven or earth can prevent it.

Rebecca [West] can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely.

Even to this day it is easier than it ought to be for me to get a rise out of an American by telling him something about himself which is equally true about every human being on the face of the globe. He at once resents this as a disparagement and an assertion on my part that people in other parts of the globe are not like that, and are loftily superior to such weaknesses.

To a professional critic (I have been one myself) theatre-going is the curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better.

I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time.... What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

I can't control what life did to me, but I can control how I react. Therein lies the difference.

Get married, but never to a man who is home all day.

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.

The politician who once had to learn to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.

If you say that God is good, great, blessed, wise or any such thing, the starting point is this : God is.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

Marriage is tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and dont expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear thinking about.

The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.

Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.