There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
— Man and Superman
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including Man and Superman, Pygmalion and Saint Joan.
With a range that took in both contemporary satire and historical allegory, he became the leading dramatist of his generation and received the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Dublin, he moved to London in 1876 and struggled to establish himself as a writer while educating himself. By the mid-1880s he was a respected theatre and music critic. He joined the Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer, and his first public success as a playwright was Arms and the Man in 1894. Man and Superman and Pygmalion are his most quoted works in our library.
With a range that took in both contemporary satire and historical allegory, he became the leading dramatist of his generation and received the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Dublin, he moved to London in 1876 and struggled to establish himself as a writer while educating himself. By the mid-1880s he was a respected theatre and music critic. He joined the Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer, and his first public success as a playwright was Arms and the Man in 1894. Man and Superman and Pygmalion are his most quoted works in our library.
Most quoted works
- Man and Superman 15
- Pygmalion 11
- Heartbreak House 7
- Saint Joan 6
- Misalliance 4
- Mrs. Warren's Profession 3
What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.
— Pygmalion
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.
— Man and Superman
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
— Man and Superman
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
— Immaturity
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
— Back to Methuselah
The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.
— Saint Joan
Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.
— Saint Joan
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
— Man and Superman
You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.
— Man and Superman
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.
— Major Barbara
What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.
— Misalliance
[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
— Caesar and Cleopatra
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
— Heartbreak House
Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?
— Man and Superman
We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!
— Saint Joan
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.
— Candida
If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all.
— Heartbreak House
Well, I've known over thirty men who've found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment I suppose!
— The Doctor's Dilemma: A Tragedy
An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.
You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
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.
— Dramatic Opinions and Essays, volume 2