George Bernard Shaw

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

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

You don’t stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

The wisdom of nations lies in their proverbs, which are brief and pithy. Collect and learn them; they are notable measures of directions for human life; you have much in little; they save time in speaking; and upon occasion may be the fullest and safest answer.

I didn’t find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.

In the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am – unbound.

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life — some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed — because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience.

It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures.