Bernard Quotes

A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

If you do not write for publication, there is little point in writing at all.

All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins?

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.

You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you? . . . If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.

Get married, but never to a man who is home all day.

Marriage is tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and dont expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear thinking about.

The politician who once had to learn to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.

If you say that God is good, great, blessed, wise or any such thing, the starting point is this : God is.

The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.

It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.

Unless the law of marriage were first made human, it could never become divine.

When I speak of The Case for Equality I mean human equality; and that, of course, can only mean one thing: it means equality of income.

Democracy means the organization of society for the benefit and at the expense of everybody indiscriminately and not for the benefit of a privileged class.

Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.

Men are always thinking that they are going to do something grandly wicked to their enemies; but when it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.

Blasphemy and sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State).

I can't control what life did to me, but I can control how I react. Therein lies the difference.

Once the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible, we crucified it.

The person who is ignorant enough to believe that his nourishment depends on meat is in a horrible dilemma.

Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'.

There is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her elder sister; and that is her mother.

The Englishmen is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.

When you find something funny search it for hidden truth.

Youth, what a pity to waste it on the young.

The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing.

I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.

A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.

I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.

I am highly susceptible to the force of all truly religious music, especially to the music of my own church, the church of Shelley, Michelangelo, and Beethoven.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

The fact is that the intrinsic worth of the book, play or whatever the author is trying to sell is the least, last factor in the the whole transaction.

Taking all the round of professions and occupations, you will find that every man is the worse for being poor; and the doctor is a specially dangerous man when poor.

Style is effectiveness of assertion.

You know, Tolstoy, like myself, wasn't taken in by superstitions like science and medicine.

I must have been an insufferable child; all children are.

The test to which all methods of treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not.

I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.

Rebecca [West] can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely.

To a professional critic (I have been one myself) theatre-going is the curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better.

We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time; or we shall stick in the mud.

It is in the hour of trial that a man finds his true profession.

Every girl has a right to be loved.

The ability to make witty observations is commonly refered to as "cynism" by people who lack it.

Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.