Quotes & Sayings About Pygmalion

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

Let me be candid. If I had to rank book-acquisition experiences in order of comfort, ease, and satisfaction, the list would go like this: 1. The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley. 2. A big, bright Barnes & Noble. I know they're corporate, but let's face it - those stores are nice. Especially the ones with big couches. 3. The book aisle at Walmart. (It's next to the potting soil.) 4. The lending library aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, a nuclear submarine deep beneath the surface of the Pacific. 5. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. — Robin Sloan

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

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

What was the name of Pygmalion's sister?"
She blinked, twice, obviously surprised. "Ummm," she said, keeping her eyes on me. "I don't know."
Rogerson did," I told her. "Rogerson knew everything. — Sarah Dessen

Eliza was my first name for two reasons. My dad was reading 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' which features the maid Eliza in it, when I was born. Then there was Eliza Doolittle from 'My Fair Lady' and 'Pygmalion.' My mum always loved the name, and I got called Eliza Doolittle a lot, so it stuck, basically. — Eliza Doolittle

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

Venus, taking pity on the artist Pygmalion when he fell hopelessly in love with his statue, granted his fondest wish and turned the statue into a beautiful woman, Galatea. — Michio Kaku

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

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

The play you're referring to. It's Pygmalion. My Fair Lady is just its bastard offspring. I — Jojo Moyes

I laughed and shook my head. 'I don't think so. My mum doesn't really go out. And it's not my cup of tea.'

'Like films with subtitles weren't your cup of tea?'

I frowned at him. 'I'm not your project, Will. This isn't My Fair Lady.'

'Pygmalion.'

'What?'

'The play you're referring to. It's Pygmalion. My Fair Lady is just its bastard offspring. — Jojo Moyes

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

Medicine had granted permission to a fantasy that men have never abandoned, a muddled version of what Pygmalion wanted - something between a real woman and a beautiful thing. — Siri Hustvedt

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

I've been shocked by film actors - 25 and under - having such confidence and cockiness to rewrite a scene. My background is more about the director being in control. It's all about yielding. It's an oddly submissive relationship in which you're moulded, Pygmalion-style. — Anne-Marie Duff

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

Every man is his own Pygmalion, and spends his life fashioning himself. And in fashioning himself, for good or ill, he fashions the human race and its future. — I. F. Stone

Pygmalion formed an ivory maid, and longed for an informing soul. She, on the contrary, combined all the qualities of a hero's mind, and fate presented a statue in which she might enshrine them. — Mary Wollstonecraft

As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him, "See my motor here; watch me reverse it." I cannot begin to describe my emotions. Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved. A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally, I would have given for that one which I had wrested from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence ... — Nikola Tesla

I've always really been interested in the Pygmalion myth and both what it has to say about creativity and what it has to say about relationships between men and women. — Zoe Kazan

I was not a very popular kid in high school, and I had this idea that the way that I dressed would change how liked I was. It was that kind of Pygmalion story. I think, ultimately that's probably why I became interested in fashion, its transformative power, and how it can change your identity. — Joseph Altuzarra

A group of girls with their hair hanging loose over their shoulders, and the most strident voices imaginable, sold flowers at the foot of an equestrian statue, done in bronze by Thornycroft when the Empress was a young woman. — Willa Cather

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain — Eliza Doolittle

It" is the idea of him or her that resides in us--inspired by the "Something" in them, as Pope has it, "That gives us back the Image of our Mind." Although the perception of It must be excited by some extraordinary perturbation in the looks and personality of the adored, the aura that It broadcasts arises not merely from the singularity of an original, as Walter Benjamin supposed, but also from the fabulous success of its reproducibility in the imaginations of many others, charmed exponentially by the number of its copies. The one-of-kind item must become a type, a replicable role-icon of itself--from "a Charles Hart" or "a Nell Gwyn" to "a Mary Pickford" or "a Douglas Fairbanks"--in order to unleash the Pygmalion effect in the hearts and minds of the fans, making the idea of him or her theirs--as much or more than anything else they might call their own. — Joseph Roach