George Bernard Shaw

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.

I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

When the righteous man truth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.

The luster of diamonds is invigorated by the interposition of darker bodies; the lights of a picture are created by the shades; the highest pleasure which nature has indulged to sensitive perception is that of rest after fatigue.

Work is always an antidote to depression.

The public must and will be served.

Avoid popularity it has many snares and no real benefit.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation — a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together, and if we are to live together we have to talk.

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.

One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.