I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow’s feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Beauty
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
All problems are finally scientific problems.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Problems
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Fools, Foolishness
No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Self-respect, Self Respect, Talent
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent’s first duty.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Education
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Crime and Punishment, Sports, Hunting
It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Thought, Thoughts
Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Work
What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care of that.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Marriage
Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Liberty, Equality
No man is a match for a woman, except with a poker and a hobnailed pair of boots-and not always even then.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Women
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge : it is more dangerous than ignorance.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Knowledge, Education
I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Criticism
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Censorship
Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Service, Servants
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Religion
The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Art and Riches, Beauty and Happiness
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
—George Bernard Shaw
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Sanity
The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.
—George Bernard Shaw
Success covers a multitude of blunders.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Success & Failure, Success
Self-denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Self-Discovery, Sacrifice
Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Death
Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Money
Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Ancestors, Ancestry
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
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
—George Bernard Shaw
Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Ideals
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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