George Bernard Shaw

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

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

Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.

To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.

Logic is like the sword

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

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

Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

It is possible to be free and loving no matter what your circumstances.

Sometimes if I see negative things it really doesn’t faze me, because you’ve got to be tough and you’ve got to be you.

For disappointments, that come not by our own folly, they are the trials or corrections of Heaven: and it is our own fault, if they prove not our advantage.