FridayMay 09, 2025
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
Youth is wasted on the young.
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarf's in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.
When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; When a tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity. The distinction between crime and justice is no greater.
With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not ever Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.
The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
The seven deadly sins...Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.
The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.
There are scores of thousands of sects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject.
There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.
To the person with a toothache, even if the world is tottering, there is nothing more important than a visit to a dentist.
Very few people can afford to be poor.
Vice is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy Are the canonical vices.
Virtue is insufficient temptation.
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it, than to consume wealth without producing it.
Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more.
What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.
I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.
I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living as seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week
A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.
Life is not meant to be easy, my child, But take courage, It can be delightful.
A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.
A man who has no office to go to - I don't care who he is - confronts a trial of which you can have no conception.
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not Believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
That older and greater church to which I belong; the church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, and affirm good fellowship without mawkishness.
Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
He who has never hoped can never despair.
He who can does. He who can't, teaches.
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die, Any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
One man who has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more Arduous.
Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but you must get a man through his own religion, not through yours.
Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
The British soldier can stand up to anything - except the British War Office.
Pickering: Have you no morals, man? Doolittle: Can't afford them, Governor.
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: Age, which forgives itself anything, is forgiven nothing.
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another is it is not done.
Vitality is a woman is a blind fury of creation.
Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and youre driving at another.
Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
Its all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
The golden rule is that there is not golden rule.
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
All censorships exist to prevent any one 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 censorships.
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.
Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.
Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.
Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretense of reluctance.
Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.
Animals are my friends ... and I don't eat my friends.
The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
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.
When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth.
You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.
When a man wants to murder a tiger, it's called sport; when the tiger wants to murder him it's called ferocity.
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.
This is the true joy in life 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.
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.
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: thats the essence of inhumanity.
You dont learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
People must not be forced to adopt me as their favourite author, even for their own good.
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
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.
The test of a man or womans breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
Brigham Young lived to become immortal in history as an American Moses by leading his people through the wilderness into an unpromised land.
Epistle Dedicatory to Man and Superman: The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this ... because ... I am a natural-born mountebank.
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
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 look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.
If all you are going to do in life are the things that are convenient and comfortable, the great things never get done.
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
You think that you are Anns suitor; that you are the pursuer and she the pursued; that it is your part to woo, to persuade, to prevail, to overcome. Fool: it is you who are the pursued, the marked-down quarry, the destined prey.
As an old soldier, I admit the cowardice: its as universal as seasickness, and matters just as little.
The English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.
You dont expect me to know what to say about a play when I dont know who the author is, do you? ... If its by a good author, its a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.
A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.
There is always danger for those who are afraid of it.
One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin.
And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your hearts desire. The other is to get it.
All sorts of bodily diseases are produced by half used minds.
We dont bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we dont dress well and weve got no manners.
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
We educate one another; and we cannot do this if half of us consider the other half not good enough to talk to.
The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.
How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.... It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman despise him.
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
We must all share in the evils of the world or move to another planet.
Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?
The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job.
I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul.
A lifetime of happiness: no man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.
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.
Hate is the coward's revenge for being humiliated.
You can not believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
The great advantage of a hotel is that its a refuge from home life
I cant talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.
Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination.
When commenting on the turmoil and disorder of the world, If the other planets are inhabited, they must be using this earth as their insane asylum.
Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.
My way of joking is to tell the truth, Its the funniest joke in the world.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
You see things and say, 'why'? but I dream things that never were and say, 'why not'?
Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die. [Spoken to his nurse.]
A man learns to skate by staggering about making a fool of himself; indeed, he progresses in all things by making a fool of himself.
The liars punishment is, not in the least that he cannot be believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage it can be delightful.
I have to live for others and not for myself; thats middle-class morality.
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.
You're not a man, youre a machine.
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
The great secret is not having bad manners or good manners or having 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.
Marry Ann; and at the end of a week youll find no more inspiration in her than in a plate of muffins.
What God hath joined together no man shall ever put asunder: God will take care of that.
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.
Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.
Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole, arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness found by mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly vitality.
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
The true joy in life is being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.
One man that has a mind and knows it, can always beat ten men who havent and dont.
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.
The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honour, generosity and beauty.... Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.
I like a bit of a mongrel myself, whether its a man or a dog. Theyre the best for every day.
A man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.
If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.
A man who has no office to go to I dont care who he is is a trial of which you can have no conception.
It is well to be off with the Old Woman before youre on with the new.
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it.
If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?
Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
A great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.
The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.
Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.
Power does not corrupt men. Fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.
Well, sir, you never can tell. Thats a principle in life with me, sir, if youll excuse my having such a thing.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions,of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing.... It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
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?
The man who listens to Reason is lost; Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.
We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
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.
We are made wise not by the recollections of our past, but by the responsibilities of the our future.
I am a sort of collector of religions: and the curious thing is that I find I can believe in them all.
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.
It is easy terribly easy to shake a mans faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a mans spirit is devils work.
No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.... It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.
You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges: the old ones, grub.
He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him
My friend, when a man has anything to tell in this world, the difficulty is not to make him tell it, but to prevent him from telling it too often.
I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car.
Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend if you have one. Telegram inviting Winston Churchill to opening night of Pygmalion. Churchill wired back: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second if there is one.
The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
Religion is a great force the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows dont understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.
Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.
I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it in to existence or clearing the way for it.
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
Success covers a multitude of blunders.
To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
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