Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.

Most people go to their grave with their music inside them.

She had lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.

A happy familiy is but an earlier heaven.

It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

I have never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is not much harm in a lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics, no chivalry, no gentility; in short, no reason for destroying anything that he does not want to eat

The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?Making life means making trouble. There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things.

The average age (longevity) of a meat eater is 63. I am on the verge of 85 and still work as hard as ever. I have lived quite long enough and am trying to die; but I simply cannot do it. A single beef-steak would finish me; but I cannot bring myself to swallow it. I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

Morals are a luxury of the rich.

The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.