Pygmalion Quotes

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

– George Bernard Shaw

It’s all right: he’s a gentleman: look at his boots.

– George Bernard Shaw

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

– George Bernard Shaw

You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party.

– George Bernard Shaw

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.

– George Bernard Shaw

PICKERING:Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?
HIGGINS [moodily]:Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?

– George Bernard Shaw

PICKERING: Have you no morals, man
DOOLITTLE: Can’t afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

– George Bernard Shaw

I don’t want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady.

– George Bernard Shaw

Time enough to think of the future when you haven’t any future to think of.

– George Bernard Shaw

I’m one of the undeserving poor…up agen middle-class morality all the time…What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

– George Bernard Shaw

Gin was mother’s milk to her.

– George Bernard Shaw

I sold flowers. I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me I’m not fit to sell anything else.

– George Bernard Shaw

The most original moralist at present in England, to the best of [his] knowledge, was Alfred Doolittle, a common dustman.

– George Bernard Shaw

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

– George Bernard Shaw

I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

– George Bernard Shaw

You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don’t you? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like. Marry some sentimental hog or other with lots of money, and a thick pair of lips to kiss you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you with.

– George Bernard Shaw

I have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesn’t become either the human face or the human soul. I am expressing my righteous contempt for Commercialism. I don’t and won’t trade in affection. You call me a brute because you couldn’t buy a claim on me by fetching my slippers and finding my spectacles. You were a fool: I think a woman fetching a man’s slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch your slippers? I think a good deal more of you for throwing them in my face. No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who cares for a slave?

– George Bernard Shaw

She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man.

– George Bernard Shaw

The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out.

– George Bernard Shaw

If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.

– George Bernard Shaw

It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.

– George Bernard Shaw