George Bernard Shaw

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.

You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

I pray Thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within.

I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.

Remembering a wrong is like carrying a burden on the mind.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.

To be like Christ is to be a Christian.

I’m a good Muslim and I’m only interested in Islam.

Perhaps the most spiritual thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with the eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.

We’ve had the goddam Ages of Faith, we’ve had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity.

Heaven and earth and I are of the same root, The ten-thousand things and I are of one substance.

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea.

If something is easy for you, work on it a little. If it’s hard for you, work on it a lot.

The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.