George Bernard Shaw

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

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

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

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

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

I gleaned jests at home from obsolete farces.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

We love and lose in China, we weep on England’s moors, and laugh and moan in Guinea, and thrive on Spanish shores. We seek success in Finland, are born and die in Maine. In minor ways we differ, in major we’re the same.

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail, toil, envy, want, and patron.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

If you can’t forgive and forget, pick one.

Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.