George Bernard Shaw Quotes on Wisdom
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My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
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'All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense.'
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The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
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Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
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It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.[1]
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I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig, you get dirty; and besides, the pig likes it.
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The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.[1]
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When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.[1]
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Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly.
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He never invested his whole moral capital in a man, a book, or a cause, but treasured up wisdom wherever it could be picked up, always with scrupulous acknowledgment ... His eclecticism saving him from the cycle of hope-disillusion-despair, his highest effectiveness was as a skirmisher in the daily battle for light and justice, as a critic of new doctrine and a refurbisher of old, as a voice of warning and encouragement. That his action has not been in vain, we can measure by how little Shaw's iconoclasm stirs our blood; we no longer remember what he destroyed that was blocking our view.