George Bernard Shaw

Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

I’m only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.

Silence is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence. The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote, Only let the moving waters calm down, and the sun and moon will be reflected on the surface of your being.

Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can be what you want to be.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do what is right.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.