George Bernard Shaw

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. 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.

You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

Don’t order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don’t know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.

The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one – to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF.