Top 500 George Bernard Shaw Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous.”

— George Bernard Shaw

302. “Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.”

— George Bernard Shaw

303. “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.”

— George Bernard Shaw

304. “The fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.”

— George Bernard Shaw

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— George Bernard Shaw

306. “Wisdom is wasted on the old, and youth is wasted on the young.”

— George Bernard Shaw

307. “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

308. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

310. “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

311. “My reputation grows with every failure.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

313. “It is easy – terribly easy – to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.”

— George Bernard Shaw

314. “Seemingly unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. Much progress, therefore, depends on such people.”

— George Bernard Shaw

315. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

320. “Virtue is insufficient temptation.”

— George Bernard Shaw

321. “I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

323. “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

324. “Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”

— George Bernard Shaw

325. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

340. “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

341. “Success covers a multitude of blunders.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

346. “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

347. “Our prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.”

— George Bernard Shaw

348. “Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

350. “We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.”

— George Bernard Shaw

Featured in: Real Quotes