George Bernard Shaw

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

You’ll never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

The soul’s emphasis is always right.

In all evils which admits a remedy, impatience should be avoided, because it wastes the time and attention in complaints which, if properly applied, might remove the cause.

What fugitive from his country can also escape from himself.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

So many fail because they don’t get started – they don’t go. They don’t overcome inertia. They don’t begin.

Gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted. In time, you are made to realize that the kindness done you is become a curse and you wish it had not happened.

There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. That little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.