George Bernard Shaw

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

If you are good, life is good.

Life is largely a matter of expectation.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.

Your most precious, valued possessions and your greatest powers are invisible and intangible. No one can take them. You, and you alone, can give them. You will receive abundance for your giving.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.

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.