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...

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you’ll find you’ve done it.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

If we women were particular about men’s characters, we should never get married at all.

NORA [looking earnestly and a little doubtfully at him]. Surelyif you let one woman cry on you like that you’d never let anothertouch you.BROADBENT [conscientiously]. One should not. One OUGHT not, mydear girl. But the...

Character actor’ is a technical term denoting a clever stage performer who cannot act, and therefore makes an elaborate study of the disguises and stage tricks by which acting can be grotesquely simulated.

I could not find the exact wording but Shaw said instead of calling people whires and blacks, we should say browns and pinks.

I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’ You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery – it’s the sincerest form of learning.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make...

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.

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

HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper – say on a canal barge…

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every financier a dictator, every private employer a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers...

The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination

There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the...

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an...

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

You don’t stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!

A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere – no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to...

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting...

War does not decide who is right but who is left.

Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to...

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has...

Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy...

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

Belief in God meant belief in the old tribal idol called Jehovah; and I would not pretend I did not know whether it existed or not.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying,...