George Bernard Shaw Quotes

( George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and an Oscar in 1938 for his work on the film Pygmalion. )

1. My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
    
2. Why was I born with such contemporaries?
    
3. Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.
    
4. A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
    
5. The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.
    
6. I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.
    
7. The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.
    
8. Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.
    
9. My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.
    
10. 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, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it.
     
11. The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
     
12. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
     
13. The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
     
14. In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.
     
15. Life is not meant to be easy, my child but take courage: it can be delightful.
     
16. Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
     
17. There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
     
18. The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.
     
19. The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
     
20. Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
     
21. Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
     
22. What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.
     
23. Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.
     
24. The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.
     
25. When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.
     
26. Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
     
27. Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
     
28. A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
     
29. I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
     
30. I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.
     
31. When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
     
32. Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.