George Bernard Shaw

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

Opportunity makes a thief.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be a phony.

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.

The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.

Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is false, or at least incomplete.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

It is a profitable Wisdom to know when we have done enough: Much time and Pains are spared, in not flattering our selves against Probabilities.

When one has tasted it Watermelon he knows what the angels eat.

You’ve got to have a good spirit on the inside. That’s what’s really going to make you look like you’re ready to rock the world.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.