An Irish playwright with one of the great talents for words in the history of English, Shaw is often quoted and his lessons taught and retaught down through the ages. You may be most familiar with his play Pygmalion, which the successful film and musical My Fair Lady is based on. Here’s a good sampling of the most famous George Bernard Shaw quotes.
A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.
A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
Very few people can afford to be poor.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
Better never than late.
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.
Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.
Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.
Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
Virtue is insufficient temptation.
Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?