George Bernard Shaw

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing –a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

They must first judge themselves, that presume to censure others: And such will not be apt to overshoot the Mark. We are too ready to retaliate, rather than forgive, or gain by Love and Information. And yet we could hurt no Man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do: For if Men did once see we Love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: And he that forgives first, wins the [Laurel]. If I am even with my Enemy, the Debt is paid; but if I forgive it, I oblige him for ever.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich, something for nothing.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

Doing as others told me, I was blind. Coming when others called me, I was lost. Then I left everyone, myself as well. Then I found myself, myself as well.

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

Defeat in itself was part and parcel of the great gambling game of politics. A man who could not accept it and try again was not of the stuff of which leaders are made.

I look up at the universe and ask, ‘What are you trying to teach me here?’ I know I won’t hear a reply, but asking the question, makes me begin looking for the answer.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.