George Bernard Shaw

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.

Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

The pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Although the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

You will find only what you bring in.

Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one.

The way to do well is to do well.

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do what is right.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

Sometimes the place you are used to is not the place you belong.

Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.