23 George Bernard Shaw Quotes on Truth

George Bernard Shaw quotes on truth

1. The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else.

2. My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

7. My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.

8. There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

16. To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.

21. All great truths begin as blasphemies.

39. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

45. 'The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.'

52. 'A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.'

74. You may remember that on Earth--though of course we never confessed it--the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.

80. But Heaven cannot be described by metaphor. Thither I shall go presently, because there I hope to escape at last from lies and from the tedious, vulgar pursuit of happiness, to spend my eons in contemplation.

123. It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.[1]

147. My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.

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.

154. Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.

177. The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

181. There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.

195. Law is blind without counsel. The counsel men agree with is vain: it is only the echo of their own voices. A million echoes will not help you to rule righteously. But he who does not fear you and shews you the other side is a pearl of the greatest price. Slay me and you go blind to your damnation. The greatest of God's names is Counsellor; and when your Empire is dust and your name a byword among the nations the temples of the living God shall still ring with his praise as Wonderful! Counsellor! the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

234. The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

238. There is no love sincerer than the love of food.[1]

241. When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.[1]

246. If you're going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they'll kill you. (cited in the lead credits to the movie C.S.A. Confederate States of America; also sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde).

248. Shaw knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails; and he takes the most elaborate pains to bring these thoughts to light in a form which is by turns abstract and familiar, conciliatory and aggressive, obvious and inferential, comic and puzzling. In a word, Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought - certainly the most conscious since Rousseau; which may be why both of them often create the same impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism. Yet it is by excess of honesty that Shaw himself lent color to his representation as an inconsequential buffoon bent on monopolizing the spotlight.