L. M. Shaw Quotes

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out.

Though justice be Thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy.

The notion that disarmament can put a stop to war is contradicted by the nearest dogfight.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

I can be very stubborn. I'm very opinionated and if people cross me at work - if people who don't know about the job try telling me what to do - I become very stubborn and really rather unpleasant.

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

The energy released by it is enormous and it becomes quite addictive, the power between the audience and the actor.

We have a 'now you see Him, now you don't' God. We have Himself clothed in visions, in dreams, in metaphors, in parables, in the poetry of the Bible, and in all the ordinariness of the lives we live.

Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

My opportunities were still there, nay, they multiplied tenfold; but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail, and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.

Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.

There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.

The education of the doctor which goes on after he has his degree is, after all, the most important part of his education.

I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various

Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.

Everybody who does not live in a prostitute's bed and on a diet of cocaine snow is called an ascetic nowadays.

Telling the truth is the funniest joke in the world.

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.

Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.

I work as my father drank.

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

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

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

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

Those who are looking for paradise on Earth should come and see Dubrovnik.

The statesman cannot govern without stability of belief, true or false.

I like being on the road, living in hotels. While I've got a real nice house, I go crazy when I'm there.

We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals

You can have fun, but you also have to put on your thinking cap every day

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition.

It sounds very pretentious, but I don't lie. It's too uncomfortable. A lot of people think because you're an actor that makes you a good liar, but one of the things I can't articulate is a bad lie.

The only thing is worrying about sleeping. If I have to be up early I worry about being able to get to sleep.