George Bernard Shaw

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

A man’s interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.

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

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

It’s like something shifted when I spoke to you, I can’t even put words to it. This sense of gentle peace, space, lightness, freedom. The realization that the longing I carried for so long, that pain was not about him all along. It was the yearning to return to that place from which, once upon a time, we all came.

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.

He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself.

These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.