George Bernard Shaw

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

The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude.

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.

The years teach much what the days never knew.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

Wisdom is better than silver and gold. I was hopeless, now I’m on hope road.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is – Let there be truth between us two forevermore.

Depriving the oppressed of a beacon of hope could lose us the world we have built and thrived in. It could cost our reputation in history as the nation distinct from all others in our achievements, our identity, and our enduring influence on mankind. Our values are central to all three.