George Bernard Shaw

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Once you truly understand that it is okay to lose or fail, you are free, you have nothing to fear, and only then, can nothing in this world hold you back.

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Prudence operates on life in the same manner as rule of composition; it produces vigilance rather than elevation; rather prevents loss than procures advantage; and often miscarriages, but seldom reaches either power or honor.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it cannot be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

One can resist the invasion of an army, but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.