George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion Quotes & Sayings

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. — George Bernard Shaw

If 'Pygmalion' is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary. — George Bernard Shaw

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another. — George Bernard Shaw

[Washington had won] a war for independence and then gone home. [He embodied] the legend of the Roman who returned to his plow after saving his country. — Richard Brookhiser

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else. — George Bernard Shaw

The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out. — George Bernard Shaw

How can she? She's incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it? — George Bernard Shaw

Making Life means making trouble — George Bernard Shaw

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby — George Bernard Shaw

Luck is nothing but combination of preparation and oppurtinity — Robin S. Sharma

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. — George Bernard Shaw

Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman. — Sid Caesar

Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one. Telegram inviting Winston Churchill to opening night of Pygmalion. Churchill wired back: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second - if there is one. — George Bernard Shaw

There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things. Henry Higgins, Act V, Pygmalion — George Bernard Shaw

Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable. — George Bernard Shaw

I don't want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady. — George Bernard Shaw

The great secret ... is not having bad manners or good manners ... but having the same manner for all human souls. — George Bernard Shaw

I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous birthday arrives. — Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Men will become poor because they will not have a love for trees ... If you don't love trees, you don't love God. — Nikephoros Of Chios

Despair

Who is he?
A railroad track toward hell?
Breaking like a stick of furniture?
The hope that suddenly overflows the cesspool?
The love that goes down the drain like spit?
The love that said forever, forever
and then runs you over like a truck?
Are you a prayer that floats into a radio advertisement?
Despair,
I don't like you very well.
You don't suit my clothes or my cigarettes.
Why do you locate here
as large as a tank,
aiming at one half of a lifetime?
Couldn't you just go float into a tree
instead of locating here at my roots,
forcing me out of the life I've led
when it's been my belly so long?

All right!
I'll take you along on the trip
where for so many years
my arms have been speechless — Anne Sexton