Dramatist · Irish · 1856 – 1950 · 219 quotes
It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
George Bernard Shaw
Dramatist · Irish · 1856 – 1950
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.
There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
It is most unwise for people in love to marry.
You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.
The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.
What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.
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.
A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.
It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
My reputation grows with every failure.
Very few people can afford to be poor.
I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
Syllables govern the world.
Most people do not pray; they only beg.
