George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist (1856–1950)

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist with a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory. He wrote more than sixty plays, including such works as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

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Alternative Names: Bernard Shaw • G.B. Shaw • G. Bernard Shaw

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

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

I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

"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, George Bernard Shaw."

He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?

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

We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.

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.

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.