George Bernard Shaw: Nothing

George Bernard Shaw was Irish playwright. Explore interesting quotes on nothing.
George Bernard Shaw: 826 quotes39 likes

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1910s, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)
Variant: A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Context: Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

“Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman's work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it.”

George Bernard Shaw book The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

The Intelligent Woman&#x27;s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, Chapter 8 http://books.google.com/books?id=ys13gZliXFAC (1928) <br class="br">1920s

“Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1910s, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)

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

George Bernard Shaw Major Barbara

Source: 1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

“It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.”

George Bernard Shaw

The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)
Context: I make no vows. I take my chance. … It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.

“It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”

George Bernard Shaw

“A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.”

George Bernard Shaw

“In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.”

George Bernard Shaw

#110
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

“I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.”

George Bernard Shaw

The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

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

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1900s, John Bull's Other Island (1907)

“The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw

Leo
1900s, Getting Married (1908)

“Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw

#160
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

“My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God — nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?”

George Bernard Shaw

Act I
1890s, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)

“Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every hour. Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of liberty.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface: &quot;The Personal Sentimental Basis of Monogamy&quot; http://www.enotalone.com/article/13714.html <br class="br">1900s, Getting Married (1908)

“When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”

George Bernard Shaw

Ellie Dunn, Act II
1910s, Heartbreak House (1919)

“Even a vortex is a vortex in something. You can't have a whirlpool without water; and you can't have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw

Acis, in Pt. V
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

“I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.”

George Bernard Shaw

Source: 1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

“Cusins: Call you poverty a crime?
Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.”

George Bernard Shaw

1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

“Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw

The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)