George Bernard Shaw

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

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.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind.

Your dreams may have shattered, but that doesn’t mean they are over. They can still be turned into a mosaic of success.

All personal achievement starts in the mind of the individual. Your personal achievement starts in your mind. The first step is to know exactly what your problem, goal or desire is.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

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

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I’ll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.