George Bernard Shaw

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it’s more dangerous to lose than to win.

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

It is a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible, and a man’s to keep unmarried as long as he can.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

For disappointments, that come not by our own folly, they are the trials or corrections of Heaven: and it is our own fault, if they prove not our advantage.

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

Stay with me,’ he said, ‘until the sun goes out, the seas are parched, and the wind draws its last breath.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits not because recompense is a pleasure for them, but because obligation is a pain.

We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first?

The idea of perfection always gives one a chance to talk without knowing facts.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person’s stature is as large as one’s own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.

I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One’s enough.

There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.