George Bernard Shaw

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

The only wealth is life.

Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

They that deny a God destroy man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.

Upon retiring, sleep as if you had entered your last sleep. Upon awakening, leave your bed behind you instantly as if you had cast away a pair of old shoes.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Absolutely speaking, Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver. An honest man would have but little occasion for it. It is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear.

You should always own a black dress because no one ever remembers a black dress.