George Bernard Shaw

Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first?

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

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

Pain never really goes away; you just elevate and get used to it by growing stronger.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.

Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa….Leonardo had eye trouble….Art couldn’t explain it….But now we’re safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf…

If it matters, it will hurt like knives or wrap and lift you in the most immeasurable joy. Or both. One thing is certain, you will feel intensely alive.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.

The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.

Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.

I’m like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he’s cold, and his clothes are torn, and he’s ashamed, but he’s not unhappy.

Men are respectable only as they respect.

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.

Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.