George Bernard Shaw Lear Quotations

A man learns to skate by staggering about making a fool of himself. Indeed he progressed in all things by making a fool of himself.

If you're not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can't be of very much use to yourself.

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.

He knows nothing; he thinks he knows everything - that clearly points to a political career

I learned to speak as people learn to skate or cycle, by doggedly making a fool of myself until I got used to it

The test of good education is seeing how it behaves in a fight.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

My reputation grows with every failure.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.

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

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Every unnatural activity of the brain is as mischievous as any unnatural activity of the body and that pressing people to learn things they do not want to know is as unwholesome and disastrous as feeding them on sawdust.

I have made it so perfectly clear in my tracts, articles, and books what was to be done that all Parliament has had to do was read my works and do the opposite

If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it.

As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.