"A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception."

"General consultant to mankind."

"Beauty is a short-lived tyranny."

"We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us ashamed of ourselves of our relatives of our incomes of our accents of our opinion of our experience just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."

"The whole world is strewn with snares traps gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women."

"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."

"What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?"

"As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."

"It's all that the young can do for the old to shock them and keep them up to date."

"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."

"We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!"

"Most people do not pray they only beg."

"She had lost the art of conversation but not unfortunately the power of speech."

"Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them make them."

"Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent."

"From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way."

"The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things."

"Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?"

"Self-denial is not a virtue it is only the effect of prudence on rascality."

"Parentage is a very important profession but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interests of the Children."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself."

"Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination."

"The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor."

"Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing."

"Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life."

"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him."

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."

"HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge..."

"There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains."

"My only policy is to profess evil and do good."

"I know your head aches. I know you're tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher's window. But think what you're trying to accomplish - just think what you're dealing with. The majesty and grandeur of the English language; it's the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds. And that's what you've set yourself out to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will."

"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you may as well make it dance."

"An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile."

"Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?"

"Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car."

"But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds."

"There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot."

"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."

"Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity."

"You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something."

"In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it."

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."

"Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation."

"Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power."

"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time."

"Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?"

"The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life."

"The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all."