George Bernard Shaw Inspirational Quotations

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

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

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

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

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

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

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

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.

I want to be all used up when I die.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.

If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.

The price of ability does not depend on merit but on supply and demand.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.

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

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.

Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.

Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?

He who has never hoped can never despair

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.

To be a champion you must live like one.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

I believe in the discipline of silence, and could talk for hours about it.

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.

Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.