George Bernard Shaw Quotes - Page 2

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?

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

A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith.

The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing - a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

I could not find the exact wording but Shaw said instead of calling people whires and blacks, we should say browns and pinks.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound.

The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

You may remember that on earth - though of course we never confessed it - the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.

Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.

If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

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

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.