George Bernard Shaw

Self-denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

He’s a man of great common sense and good taste – meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

Best friends that pick wedgies together stay besties for life!

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Property is organized robbery.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don’t labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

The way to do well is to do well.

I’ve learned that from my husband, that sort of, you know, ability to not get too high or too low with changes and bumps in the road.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.