George Bernard Shaw

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

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

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.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

The avarice person is ever in want; let your desired aim have a fixed limit.

Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find we have lost the future.

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.