George Bernard Shaw Quotes

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

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

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 nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.

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

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

I never resist temptation because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

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

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

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

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it....

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 you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.

If any religion had a chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.