George Bernard Shaw

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

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

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

When a man is just and firm in his purpose, the citizens burning to approve a wrong or the frowning looks of a tyrant. Do not shake his fixed mind, nor the Southwind. Wild lord of the uneasy Adriatic, nor the thunder in the mighty hand of Jove: Should the heavens crack and tumble down, as the ruins crushed him he would not fear.

One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

Nature hates calculators.