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!
I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.
All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport - in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign policy.
Morality consists of suspecting other people of not being legally married.
Being a mother means that your heart is no longer yours; it wanders wherever your children do
All progress depends upon the unreasonable person.
It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good . Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.
The Anti-Vivisector does not deny that physiologists must make experiments and even take chances with new methods. He says that they must not seek knowledge by criminal methods, just as they must not make money by criminal methods. He does not object to Galileo dropping cannon balls from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa; but he would object to shoving off two dogs or American tourists.
Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.
People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder column.
Take the utmost care to get well born and well brought up.
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country.
That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.
Woman's happiness begins with her first love and ends about then
Go on writing plays, my boy, One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, "Is there a play from Shaw this morning?" and when she says, "No," he will say, "Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish." And that's your chance, my boy.
The test to which all methods of treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not.
This souls'prison we call England.
You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?
When I speak of The Case for Equality I mean human equality; and that, of course, can only mean one thing: it means equality of income.
Everything I eat has been proved by some doctor or other to be a deadly poison, and everything I don't eat has been proved to be indispensable for life. But I go marching on.
I try to follow his example, not to imitate him.
If only for a half hour a day, a child should do something serviceable to the community
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
Most married couples spend the whole day apart, the woman in the house, the man in the office or study or workshop.
The problem with the press is that they can't tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilization.
I occasionally swank a little because people like it; a modest man is such a nuisance.
Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good.
I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve.
The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.
Your heart and your mouth wil be in two separate parts of your body if you again forget in whose presence you stand.
There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.
When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul.
To a professional critic (I have been one myself) theatre-going is the curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better.
Female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.
I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.
After all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.
In the right key one can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part is the establishment of the key.
Paradoxes are the only truths.
If parents would only realize how they bore their children.
The philosopher is Nature's pilot.
A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.
The politician who once had to learn to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.
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 censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient.
I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another, all would be well with the world. I found when I tried to put that into practice, not only were other people seldom lovable but I wasn't very lovable myself.
Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.
The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.
Just as the liar 's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed , but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.
Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.
