George Bernard Shaw

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

He didn’t dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Beware what you set your heart upon. For it shall surely be yours.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

Things do not change; we change.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

That strong mother doesn’t tell her cub ‘Son, stay weak so the wolves can get you’. She says, ‘Toughen up, this is reality we are living in’.