"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." "Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself." "Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends." "If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." "You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?" "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." "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." "There is no love sincerer than the love of food." "Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!" "Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." "The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time." "The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else." "You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul." "The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity." "Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it." "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 circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them." "A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it." "People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it." "My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world." "I'm sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have time to make it shorter." "All great truths begin as blasphemies." "I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation." "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." "Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world." "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 quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life." "Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it...." "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." "In heaven an angel is no one in particular." "Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads." "This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." "Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power." "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." "When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity." "Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." "I'm an atheist and I thank God for it." "Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time." "Alcohol is the anethesia by which we endure the operation of life." "Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable." "When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty." "When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth." "He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career." "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." "I never resist temptation because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me." "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." "All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship." "Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will." "My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably." "First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity." "You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing." "Once there was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time is called the Dark Ages." "Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire." "Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn." "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." "We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience." "The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech." "The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them." "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." "Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad." "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 have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot." "Your weak side, my diabolic friend, is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation. Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood of the old sea kings in his veins. Call him liar and thief; and he will only take an action against you for libel. But call him coward; and he will go mad with rage: he will face death to outface that stinging truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one: and that one is his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that they themselves are forced to reform it." "It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid." "Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty." "I knew if I waited around long enough something like this would happen." "That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her." "England and America are two countries separated by the same language." "War does not decide who is right but who is left." "Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated." "Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own." "Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." "No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means." "It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace." "The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself." "The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often." "A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out." "You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live." "We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future." "A learned man is an idler who kills time by study." "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels." "The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor." "The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place." "We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it." "The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated." "You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race." "The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third class carriages, and one soul is as good as another." "A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage." "In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness." "Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love." "It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date." "But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person's thumb are two different things." "There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it." "I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad." "Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course." "Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!" "Professor Henry Higgins: There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years!" "I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking Earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it." "There is always danger for those who are afraid." "If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience." George Bernard Shaw