George Bernard Shaw

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.

The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.

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

Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.

He who is upright in his way of life and free from sin.