George Bernard Shaw

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.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

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.

O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand.

Tis admirable to consider, how Powerful the Kings are, yet they move by the Breath of their People.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.