George Bernard Shaw

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.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.

Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.

For Wealth are all things that conduce, to one’s destruction or their use. A standard both to buy and sell, all things from heaven down to hell.

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.