"It is in the hour of trial that a man finds his true profession."
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Quote collection
George Bernard Shaw quotes (page 63 of 68)
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"You have no right to say that I am not sincere. I have found a happiness in art that real life has never given me. I am intensely in earnest about art. There is is a magic and mystery in art that you know nothing of."
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"We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time; or we shall stick in the mud."
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"To a professional critic (I have been one myself) theatre-going is the curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better."
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"Rebecca [West] can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely."
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"I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self."
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"The test to which all methods of treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not."
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"I must have been an insufferable child; all children are."
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"You know, Tolstoy, like myself, wasn't taken in by superstitions like science and medicine."
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"Style is effectiveness of assertion."
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"Taking all the round of professions and occupations, you will find that every man is the worse for being poor; and the doctor is a specially dangerous man when poor."
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"I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettishness, without being either good business men or fine judges of literature."
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"The fact is that the intrinsic worth of the book, play or whatever the author is trying to sell is the least, last factor in the the whole transaction."
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"Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices."
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"I am highly susceptible to the force of all truly religious music, especially to the music of my own church, the church of Shelley, Michelangelo, and Beethoven."
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"Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma."
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"I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures."
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"A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony."
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"I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it."
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"We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing."
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