L. M. Shaw Quotes

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

In a hospital they throw you out into the street before you are half cured, but in a nursing home they don't let you out till you are dead.

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.

Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.

'Swing' is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a 'swing band' in music.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Disappointment often focuses on the failure of our own agenda rather than on God's long-term purposes for us, which may use stress and struggle as tools for strengthening our spiritual muscles.

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

I love the idea of stepping out of the band situation into a solo world with no boundaries, no expectations, where nothing is out of bounds.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

Around me I saw women overworked and underpaid, doing men's work at half men's wages, not because their work was inferior, but because they were women.

No man manages his affairs as well as a tree does

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

On the Internet, everyone squats. In real life, the squat rack is always empty. You figure out what this means.

Even when they have nothing, the Irish emit a kind of happiness, a joy.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

If you don’t see the wonder in the most ordinary phenomenon, you’re not going to resonate very much.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

The most sincere form of love is love for food

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Nothing bigger can come to a human being than to love a great cause more than life itself.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Around '75 when the recession hit, club owners started going to disco because it was cheaper for them to just buy a sound system than it was to hire a band.

Get out of my way; for I won't stop for you.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

I wake up every morning with a great desire to live joyfully.

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

Man's inhumanity to man is only surpassed by his cruelty to animals

Decency is indecency's conspiracy of silence

Newspaper : A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.

Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.

Now that we have learned to fly the air like birds, swim under water like fish, we lack one thing - to learn to live on earth as human beings.

Experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.

If any religion had a chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

God made a woman equal to a man, but He did not make a woman equal to a woman and a man. We usually try to do the work of a man and of a woman too; then we break down.

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby

Being a mother means that your heart is no longer yours; it wanders wherever your children do

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.