Top 500 George Bernard Shaw Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts.”

— George Bernard Shaw

202. “Well, sir, you never can tell. That’s a principle in life with me, sir, if you’ll excuse my having such a thing.”

— George Bernard Shaw

203. “If any religion had a chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.”

— George Bernard Shaw

204. “Help someone, you earn a friend. Help someone too much, you make an enemy.”

— George Bernard Shaw

205. “This planet is obviously being used as an insane asylum by other planets.”

— George Bernard Shaw

206. “Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.”

— George Bernard Shaw

207. “The most sincere form of love is love for food.”

— George Bernard Shaw

208. “Most people go to their grave with their music inside them.”

— George Bernard Shaw

209. “I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.”

— George Bernard Shaw

210. “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

— George Bernard Shaw

211. “I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everyone there looks an original.”

— George Bernard Shaw

212. “We are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites. How can we hope in this world to attain the peace we say we are so anxious for?”

— George Bernard Shaw

213. “Music is the brandy of the damned.”

— George Bernard Shaw

214. “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”

— George Bernard Shaw

215. “I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.”

— George Bernard Shaw

216. “You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

217. “Telling the truth is the funniest joke in the world.”

— George Bernard Shaw

218. “Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

219. “Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.”

— George Bernard Shaw

220. “Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.”

— George Bernard Shaw

221. “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances.”

— George Bernard Shaw

222. “Stimulate the phagocytes.”

— George Bernard Shaw

223. “Our first duty is not to be poor.”

— George Bernard Shaw

224. “Emotional excitement reaches men through tea, tobacco, opium, whisky, and religion.”

— George Bernard Shaw

225. “Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.”

— George Bernard Shaw

226. “Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.”

— George Bernard Shaw

227. “All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.”

— George Bernard Shaw

228. “Like fingerprints, all marriages are different.”

— George Bernard Shaw

229. “The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.”

— George Bernard Shaw

230. “All professions are conspiracies against the laity.”

— George Bernard Shaw

231. “Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.”

— George Bernard Shaw

232. “The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.”

— George Bernard Shaw

233. “I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.”

— George Bernard Shaw

234. “The sound body is the product of the sound mind.”

— George Bernard Shaw

235. “Remember that I too am mortal.”

— George Bernard Shaw

236. “My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

238. “It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.”

— George Bernard Shaw

239. “The best way to get your point across is to entertain.”

— George Bernard Shaw

240. “I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

241. “Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit he was a first-rate political economist.”

— George Bernard Shaw

242. “All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it’s wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything!”

— George Bernard Shaw

243. “I like to quote myself frequently and often, it makes me sound much more intelligent than I actually am.”

— George Bernard Shaw

244. “Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.”

— George Bernard Shaw

245. “Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.”

— George Bernard Shaw

246. “Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.”

— George Bernard Shaw

247. “It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”

— George Bernard Shaw

248. “The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.”

— George Bernard Shaw

249. “A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.”

— George Bernard Shaw

250. “I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short- a gentlemanly gas deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel.”

— George Bernard Shaw