Top 15 George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. 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. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.

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

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

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

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.

[From the will of GBS]

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.