George Bernard Shaw

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.

I want to be all used up when I die.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?

It is your business when the wall next door catches fire.

We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

Those who cross the sea change only the climate, not their character.

Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos; trees, clouds, everything.

The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.

Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be… those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes… those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober — minded men.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.