“My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.”

— George Bernard Shaw, John Bull's Other Island (1907), Act II

About George Bernard Shaw

1856 – 1950

Irish playwright and critic, Nobel laureate in Literature (1925).

“If you teach a man anything he will never learn it.”

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

“You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.”

“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

“Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture.”

“Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

“Foolish people laugh at those readers a century ago who wept over the novels of Dickens.”

“One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh.”

“Stupid people, people who do not know how to laugh, are always pompous and self-conceited.”