George Bernard Shaw

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

Surely life, if it be not long, is tedious, since we are forced to call in the assistance of so many trifles to rid us of our time, of that time which never can return.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

Arguments of convenience lack integrity and inevitably trip you up.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

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

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.

And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.