Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Fashion, Style
Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Truth
What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Virtues, Virtue
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
Topics: Women
As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Ideas, Improvement, Goals, Progress, Excellence
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Language
The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Poverty
If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.
—George Bernard Shaw
In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Charity
The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.
—George Bernard Shaw
Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can’t blame them for that, can you?
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Respect, Respectability
Common people do not pray, my lord: they only beg
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Prayer
We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Soul
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
Topics: Honesty
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Progress
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
Topics: Mankind, War, Man
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Faith
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.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Ideas, Love
He who gives money he has not earned is generous with other people’s labor.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Charity
Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone by stone, a palace.
—George Bernard Shaw
Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Life, Humor, Jokes
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Virtues and Vices, Virtue, Virtues
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: One liners, Vegetarianism
The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Humor, Jokes
Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real center of the household.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Horses
I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Health
When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them how they would like to life in a stationary one, and do without change.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Change
Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Music
The worst sin… is… to be indifferent.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Indifference, Apathy
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- William Butler Yeats Irish Poet
- George William Russell Irish Author
- Oscar Wilde Irish Poet, Playwright
- Maurice Maeterlinck Belgian Dramatist
- Brendan Behan Irish Poet
- Oliver Goldsmith Anglo-Irish Novelist, Poet
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan Irish-born British Playwright
- Robertson Davies Canadian Novelist, Playwright
- Elizabeth Bowen Irish Novelist
- Edmund Burke British Philosopher, Statesman
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