George Bernard Shaw

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.

My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately

He hates chess. He says it is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something clever when they are only wasting their time.

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

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

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my own constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

Youth is unduly busy with pampering the outer person.

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.

In charity there is no excess.

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.