Top 1385 Quotes & Sayings by George Bernard Shaw - Page 22

Nobel Prize money is a life-belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.

The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.

The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.

Dancing is a very crude attempt to get into the rhythm of life.

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.

Go anywhere in England where there are natural wholesome, contented and really nice English people; and what do you find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.

Decency cannot be discussed without indecency!

That older and greater church to which I belong: the church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice

Hell is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

She is immensely interested in him. She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man.

When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while to keep them.

The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization.

A woman whose face looked as if it had been made of sugar and someone had licked it.

Never repeat old grievances.

Everyone can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who don't are the wrong ones.

I don't know what to say about this book. The experience on which it is founded is so extraordinary, that an honest record of it should be preserved . . . But it would have driven me mad; and I am not sure that the author came out of it without a slight derangement.

If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litt

Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.

Money is the counter that enables life to be lived socially; it is life as truly as sovereigns and banknotes are money.

Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce greatpoetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.

I assume that to prevent illness in later life, you should never have been born at all.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come.

Financiers live in a world of illusion. They count on something which they call the capital of the country, which has no existence.

Who is this Baby Ruth? And what does she do?

The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.

Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.

If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman, he may pronounce as he pleases.

I don't want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way.

Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition.

If you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.

I do not want actors and actresses to understand my plays. That is not necessary. If they will only pronounce the correct sounds I can guarantee the results.

The fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.

Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty.

Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.

There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.

Happiness and Beauty are by-products.

Nature holds no brief for the human experiment; it must stand or fall by its results.

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination.

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.

Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.

Well, upon my soul! You are not ashamed to stand there and confess yourself a disgusting drunkard.

Morality consists of suspecting other people of not being legally married.

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

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop.

I work as my father drank.

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

You propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing -a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom before morning.

Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.

Faith in reason as a prime motor is no longer the criterion of the sound mind, any more than faith in the Bible is the criterion of righteous intention.