George Bernard Shaw

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.

Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

Loyalty in a critic is corruption.

It is easy-terribly easy-to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to to break a man's spirit is Devil's work.

My dear: in this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you do.

And if I am further pressed to declare straightforwardly whether I mean to disparage these authorities [who criticize Ibsen], I reply, pointedly, that I do. I affirm that such criticisms are written by men who know as much of political life as I know of navigation. (P. 56)

How we lavish our money and worship on Shakespeare without in the least knowing why!

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.

You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does NOT triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

How can she? She's incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.

I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.