George Bernard Shaw

“The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.”

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

“When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.”

“We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”

“He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”

“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....”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 d...”

“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 pe...”

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

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

“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous q...”

“La science est une nouvelle religion et la désinfection est son eau bénite.”

“The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and...”

“Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.”

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstance...”

“I hear you say 'Why?' Always 'Why?' You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”