George Bernard Shaw

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

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

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.

In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

New arts destroy the old.

Look to make your course regular, that men may know beforehand what they may expect.

The wisdom of nations lies in their proverbs, which are brief and pithy. Collect and learn them; they are notable measures of directions for human life; you have much in little; they save time in speaking; and upon occasion may be the fullest and safest answer.

Defeat in itself was part and parcel of the great gambling game of politics. A man who could not accept it and try again was not of the stuff of which leaders are made.

To see helpless infancy stretching out her hands, and pouring out her cries in testimony of dependence, without any powers to alarm jealousy, or any guilt to alienate affection, must surely awaken tenderness in every human mind; and tenderness once excited will be hourly increased by the natural contagion of felicity, by the repercussion of communicated pleasure, by the consciousness of dignity of benefaction.

In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.