George Bernard Shaw

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

Mysteries are due to secrecy.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

Above all, we must avoid the pitfalls of tribalism. If we are divided among ourselves on tribal lines, we open our doors to foreign intervention and its potentially harmful consequences.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

The superfluous, a very necessary thing.

I answer the heroic question Death where is thy sting? It is here in my heart and mind and memories

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.