George Bernard Shaw

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

He who has never hoped can never despair.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

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.

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running.

Although the road is never ending, take a step and keep walking, do not look fearfully into the distance…on the path let the heart be your guide for the body is hesitant and full of fear.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

The first thing a great person does, is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.

Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

It is proved…that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.