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Home / Books / The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more

The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more

Book by George Bernard Shaw · 50 quotes · Men, Ifs, Knows

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The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more Quotes

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”

“First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.”

“A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.”

“Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”

“The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.”

“If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.”

“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”

“No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.”

“Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.”

“The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.”

“Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.”

“I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.”

“I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.”

“Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.”

“It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.”

“The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.”

“When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content.”

“In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.”

“Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.”

“What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.”

“It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.”

“When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul.”

“I like a bit of mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog.”

“The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.”

“You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could.”

“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.”

“If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.”

“What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.”

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

“Liberty is the breath of life to nations.”

“Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.”

“Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job.”

“Life is a disease; and the only difference between on man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.”

“Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.”

“All progress means war with society.”

“The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.”

“If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.”

“Activity is the only road to knowledge.”

“At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.”

“The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.”

“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.”

“What use are cartridges in battle? I always carry chocolate instead.”

“No man manages his affairs as well as a tree does”

“If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.”

“Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.”

“Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?”

“No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.”

“Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.”

“God is on the side of the big battalions.”