George Bernard Shaw

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman – repose in energy.

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

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

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Obscurity and competence: That is the life that is worth living.

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

Be humble. It becomes a creature, a depending and borrowed being, that lives not of itself, but breathes in another’s air with another’s breath, and is accountable for every moment of time and can call nothing its own, but is absolutely a tenant at will of the great Lord of heaven and earth.

No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

It always seems impossible until its done.