Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.

While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: To ----, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw. He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.

I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.

I never resist temptation because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it....

Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.

If any religion had a chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.