Top 500 George Bernard Shaw Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “In a hospital they throw you out into the street before you are half cured, but in a nursing home they don’t let you out till you are dead.”

— George Bernard Shaw

302. “I’ve posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin’s Thinker, but I merely looked constipated.”

— George Bernard Shaw

303. “Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.”

— George Bernard Shaw

304. “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”

— George Bernard Shaw

305. “My reputation grows with every failure.”

— George Bernard Shaw

306. “NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Giuseppe? Everything he says is wrong. GIUSEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right.”

— George Bernard Shaw

307. “A succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.”

— George Bernard Shaw

308. “I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.”

— George Bernard Shaw

309. “The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.”

— George Bernard Shaw

310. “If in the library of your house you do not have the works of the ancient Greek writers, then you live in a house with no light.”

— George Bernard Shaw

311. “He who has never hoped can never despair.”

— George Bernard Shaw

312. “The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.”

— George Bernard Shaw

313. “Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.”

— George Bernard Shaw

314. “Virtue is insufficient temptation.”

— George Bernard Shaw

315. “My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.”

— George Bernard Shaw

316. “The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.”

— George Bernard Shaw

317. “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.”

— George Bernard Shaw

318. “Greatness is one of the sensations of littleness.”

— George Bernard Shaw

319. “From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way.”

— George Bernard Shaw

320. “Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.”

— George Bernard Shaw

321. “In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.”

— George Bernard Shaw

322. “The righteous man takes his life in his hand whenever he utters the truth.”

— George Bernard Shaw

323. “If pity is akin to love, gratitude is akin to the other thing.”

— George Bernard Shaw

324. “What is life but a series of inspired follies...”

— George Bernard Shaw

325. “We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way.”

— George Bernard Shaw

326. “Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man’s will and his environment: in a word, of problem.”

— George Bernard Shaw

327. “Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone upon stone, a palace.”

— George Bernard Shaw

328. “Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.”

— George Bernard Shaw

329. “Decency is indecency’s conspiracy of silence.”

— George Bernard Shaw

330. “A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.”

— George Bernard Shaw

331. “Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.”

— George Bernard Shaw

332. “Be like the sun and meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter.”

— George Bernard Shaw

333. “Success covers a multitude of blunders.”

— George Bernard Shaw

334. “Changeable women are more endurable that monotonous ones; they are sometimes murdered but never deserted.”

— George Bernard Shaw

335. “Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

336. “Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.”

— George Bernard Shaw

337. “Stop being Jews and start being human beings.”

— George Bernard Shaw

338. “The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.”

— George Bernard Shaw

339. “There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.”

— George Bernard Shaw

340. “The greatest thing in life is to die young – but delay it as long as possible.”

— George Bernard Shaw

341. “There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle.”

— George Bernard Shaw

342. “I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination.”

— George Bernard Shaw

343. “The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.”

— George Bernard Shaw

344. “A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.”

— George Bernard Shaw

345. “Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job.”

— George Bernard Shaw

346. “Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.”

— George Bernard Shaw

347. “The love of economy is the root of all virtue.”

— George Bernard Shaw

348. “Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.”

— George Bernard Shaw

349. “History, sir, will tell lies as usual.”

— George Bernard Shaw

350. “Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions.”

— George Bernard Shaw