George Bernard Shaw on Life

"Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices."

"You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living."

"There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."

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

"Economy is the art of making the most of life. The love of economy is the root of all virtue."

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

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."

"is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time."

"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."

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."

"Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another."

"Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion."

"Perhaps woman's art is of woman's life a thing apart, 'tis man's whole existence; just as love is said to be the reverse — though it isn't."

"I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet."

"Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo."

"Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men."

"As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."

"In heaven an angel is no one in particular."

"Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

"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."

"Why was I born with such contemporaries?"

"You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death."

"A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them."

"Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing."

"I had patience with them for many ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: they embraced death, and said that eternal life was a fable. I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made..."

"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."

"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."

"Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with."

"Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls."