George Bernard Shaw

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

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

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.

The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.

Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue-to the end that we should hear and see more than we speak.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

I have thought of a pulley to raise me gradually; but that would give me pain, as it would counteract my natural inclination. I would have something that can dissipate the inertia and give elasticity to the muscles. We can heat the body, we can cool it; we can give it tension or relaxation; and surely it is possible to bring it into a state in which rising from bed will not be a pain.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

It is a severe Rebuke upon us, that God makes us so many Allowances, and we make so few to our Neighbor: As if Charity had nothing to do with Religion; Or Love with Faith, that ought to work by it.

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.