George Bernard Shaw

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

The sky was the color of hard crimson, dripping down a canvas, the moon splashed silver across red. Her soothing balm healing my soul in swathes of calmness, I breathe in her tides and let my body be washed ashore, lying in the sands of eternity.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

Virtue is too often merely local.

Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.