George Bernard Shaw

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Kings are not born they are made by universal hallucination.

Youth is wasted on the young.

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.

A man’s true delight is to do the things he was made for.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

To choose time is to save time.

When one wanted one’s interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people’s tricks.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

The one who prosperity takes too much delight in will be the most shocked by reverses.

Sir, I have no objection to a man’s drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it. Every man is to judge for himself, according to the effects which he experiences.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

No two men can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.