George Bernard Shaw
524 quotes
Biography
George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond.
"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."
"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."
"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."
"She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech."
"You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?"
"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."
"Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends."
"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."
"First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity."
"The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people."
"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance."
"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."
"Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time."
"A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it."
"My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world."
"The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure."
"I’m an atheist and I thank God for it."
"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time."
"When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth."
"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."
"What you are to do without me I cannot imagine."
"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read."[As quoted in Literary Censorship in England (in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)]"
"Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men."
"A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity."
"We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience."