Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter;but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!

When a lion meets another with a louder roar, the first lion thinks the last a bore.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Shall I turn up the light for you? No, give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light.

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.

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.