A dinner! How horrible! I am to be made the pretext for killing all those wretched animals and birds, and fish! Thank you for nothing. Now if it were to be a fast instead of a feast; say a solemn three days' abstention from corpses in my honour, I could at least pretend to believe that it was disinterested. Blood sacrifices are not in my line
Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses.
Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor: not even a poor employer or a poor landlord.
To make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.
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. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles and cuts off his king's head on republican principles.
You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.
I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
If pity is akin to love, gratitude is akin to the other thing.
When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.
There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.
I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!
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.
The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization.
People get nothing out of books but what they bring to them.
No child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.
Brains are not everything.
You will think less of the art, when you know the artist
A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.
Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.
All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies.
But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.
A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.
Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.
Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.
When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content.
I fought linotype and montype for some time because it would not justify as well as handset could be made to do; but at last, as always happens, the machine outdid the hand, and got all the best types on it.
Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.
It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.
A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
Youth is just wasted on young people.
It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls.
Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure 'inflation'.
Not until he acquires European manners does the American anarchist become the gentleman who assures you that people cannot be mademoral by Act of Parliament (the truth being that it is only by Acts of Parliament that men in large communities can be made moral, even when they want to).
Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.
What, or who, led you to take up photography, and about what date ?George Bernard Shaw – I always wanted to draw and paint. I had no literary ambition. I aspired to be a Michelangelo, not a Shakespeare. But I could not draw well enough to satisfy myself; and the instruction I could get was worse than useless. So when dry plates and push buttons came into the market I bought a box camera and began pushing the button. It was in 1898.
A married man is a man with a past, while a bachelor is a man with a future.
I don't want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.
The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.
The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.
We educate one another; and we cannot do this if half of us consider the other half not good enough to talk to.
Oh, well, if you want original conversations, you'd better go and talk to yourself.
You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.
Better never than late.
The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law. Virtually there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for the cunning and another for the simple, one law for the forceful and another for the feeble, one law for the ignorant and another for the learned, one law for the brave and another for the timid, and within family limits one law for the parent and no law at all for the child.
Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.
It is the inefficiency and sham of ... our schools ... that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.
Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. . . . It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.
It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
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.
The sound body is the product of the sound mind.
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately
Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
Englishmen never will be slaves; they are free to do whatever the government and public opinion allow them.
Make me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that surely is a great and blessed invention.
What is the use of straining after an amiable view of things, when a cynical view is most likely to be the true one?.
