George Bernard Shaw

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

My reputation grows with every failure.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.

He that thinks he can afford to be negligent is not far from being poor.

The Country is both the Philosopher’s Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

If a better system is thine, impart it; if not, make use of mine.

The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can’t blame them for that, can you?