George Bernard Shaw

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Nature has always had more force than education.

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.

We need much less than we think we need.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?

The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.