While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: “To —-, with esteem,...

The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions...

frail.” They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not...

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them

I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and...

My dear: in this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

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.

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half...

It is a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible, and a man’sto keep unmarried as long as he can.

The risks of liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and self-helplessness are another matter.

[Man] progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

Animals are my friends…and I don’t eat my friends.

If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

I know your head aches. I know you’re tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher’s window. But think what you’re trying to accomplish – just think what you’re dealing...

Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

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...

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

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...

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.”[As quoted in Literary Censorship in England (in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)]

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible…….Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the...

To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers’ time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a...

Written over the gate here are the words ‘Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.’ Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no...

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

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

There is always danger for those who are afraid.

Youth is wasted on the young.

You cannot have qualifications without experience; and you cannot have experience without personal interest and bias. That may not be an ideal arrangement; but it is the way the world is built and we must...

HIGGINS. The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if were...

Those who can do, those who can’t teach.

When I visited George Bernard Shaw, in 1948, at his home in Aylot, a suburb of London, he was extremely anxious for me to tell him all that I knew about Ingersoll. During the course...

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they...

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

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

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it...

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...