George Bernard Shaw Thinking Quotations

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.

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

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.

Some people look at the world and say 'why?' Some people look at the world and say 'why not?'

You will think less of the art, when you know the artist

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.

Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.

It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thought that sets him feeling.

If you do things merely because you think some other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state of things.

Think what cowards men would be if they had to bear children. Women are altogether a superior species.

Always strive to find out what to do by thinking, without asking anybody. If you continually do this, you will soon act like a grown-up woman. For want of doing this, a very great number of grown-up people act like children.

A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else.

Men are always thinking that they are going to do something grandly wicked to their enemies; but when it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

You're only a beginner; and what you think is love, and interest, and all that, is not real love at all: three quarters of it is only unsatisfied curiosity.

If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.

Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place.

I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve.

Our prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.

The British churchgoer prefers a severe preacher because he thinks a few home truths will do his neighbors no harm.

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

When a lion meets another with a louder roar, the first lion thinks the last a bore.

We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.

Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.

I really don't think I could consent to go to Heaven if I thought there were no animals there.

I do not know what I think until I write it.

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.

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.

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.

The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions.

A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

We are not taught to think decently on sex subjects, and consequently we have no language for them except indecent language.

Money enables us to get what we want instead of what other people think we want.

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.

When a prisoner sees the door of his dungeon open, he dashes for it without stopping to think where he shall get his dinner outside.

Marriage is tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and dont expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear thinking about.

God help England if she had no Scots to think for her.

It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.

Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think.

I never expect a soldier to think.

I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time.... What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.