Inspirational Quotations by George Bernard Shaw
- Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more
than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
- No question is so difficult to answer
as that to which the answer is obvious.
- If you have an apple and I have an apple
and we exchange these apples then
you and I will still each have one apple.
But if you have an idea and I have an idea
and we exchange these ideas,
then each of us will have two ideas.
- Some look at things that are, and ask why.
I dream of things that never were and ask why not?
- We don't stop playing because we grow old;
we grow old because we stop playing.
- Success does not consist in never making mistakes
but in never making the same one a second time.
- People are always blaming circumstances for what they are.
I do not believe in circumstances. The people that get on
in this world are the people who get up and look for the
circumstances they want, and if they cannot find them, they make them.
- The problem with communication is the illusion that it has been achieved.
- The power of accurate observation is frequently
called cynicism by those who don't have it.
- Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of
splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment,
and I want to make it burn as brightly as
possible before handing it onto future generations.
- If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet,
you'd best teach it to dance.
- The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.
- Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.
- Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.
- Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
- To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit : to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.
- The difference between the shallowest routineer and the deepest thinker appears, to the latter, trifling ; to the former, infinite.
- A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge : it is more dangerous than ignorance.
- Moderation is never applauded for its own sake.
- The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
- What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
- Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
- Greatness is the secular name for Divinity : both mean simply what lies beyond us.
- Those who understand evil pardon it : those who resent it destroy it.
- The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
- No man dares say so much of what he thinks as to appear to himself an extremist.
- 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.