The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
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.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it….
While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: To —-, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw.He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
You see things; you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
La science est une nouvelle religion et la désinfection est son eau bénite.
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.
Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshipers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.
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.
A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.
My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.[From the will of GBS]