George Bernard Shaw

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

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.

Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position.

Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.

If you develop rules, never have more than ten.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.

The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

Until we have seen someone’s darkness, we don’t really know who they are. Until we have forgiven someone’s darkness , we don’t really know what love is.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

The nose of the bulldog has been slanted backwards so that he can breathe without letting go.