21 Effective Quotations of Gearge Bernard Shaw

1. If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples, then you and I 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.
2. Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
3. You see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream things as they never were and ask, ‘Why not?’”
4. Life was driving at brains–at its darling object: an organ by which it can attain not only self-consciousness but self-understanding.
5. Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Men are wise, not in proportion to their experience, but in their capacity for experience.
9. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
10. A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
11. Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
12. Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
13. We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
14. This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations.
15. What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
16. All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
17. We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
18. Every child has a right to its own bent. . . . It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father.
19. Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
20. The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
21. 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, the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul. A moment only; but was it not enough? Were you not paid then for all the rest of your struggle on earth? . . . When I opened the gates of paradise, were you blind? Was it nothing to you? When all the stars sang in your ears and all the winds swept you the heart of heaven, were you deaf? Were you dull? was I no more to you than a bone to a dog? Was it not enough? We spent eternity together; and you ask me for a little lifetime more. We possessed all the universe together; and you ask me to give you my scanty wages as well. I have given you the greatest of all things; and you ask me to give you little things. I gave you your own soul: you ask me for my body as a plaything. Was it not enough? Was it not enough?