George Bernard Shaw

A lifetime of happiness? No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

There is only one universal passion fear.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

It is not where you start but how high you aim that matters for success.

Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.

Be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it… Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.

I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

Familiarity breeds contempt and children.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.