George Bernard Shaw

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

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes to it. He’ll beat you all at piety.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

Hunger is never delicate; they who are seldom gorged to the full with praise may be safely fed with gross compliments, for the appetite must be satisfied before it is disgusted.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.