16 George Bernard Shaw Quotes on Art

George Bernard Shaw quotes on art

34. The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

46. '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.'

47. 'There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.'

49. 'If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling. Corrupt successes, disgraceful failures, or sheeplike vegetation are all it has to offer. I prefer Art, which gives me a sixth sense of beauty, with self-respect: perhaps also an immortal reputation in return for honest endeavour in a labour of love.'

50. 'Perhaps woman's art is of woman's life a thing apart, 'tis man's whole existence; just as love is said to be the reverse - though it isn't.'

51. 'I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.'

53. 'Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartette for a family.'

63. The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.

64. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad-boy husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a bloodsucker, a hypocrite and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy!

106. Hell is full of musical amateurs. Music is the brandy of the damned.

153. It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.

186. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.

205. Dancing: The vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.

231. The material of a dramatist is always some conflict of human feeling with circumstances.

244. Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.

247. Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.