Skip to content

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.

— George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Another quote →

Topics

More quotes by George Bernard Shaw

Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.

Getting Married (1908)

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?

Saint Joan (1923)

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who havnt and dont.

The Apple Cart (1928)

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.

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

The Philanderer (1893)

All George Bernard Shaw quotes →

You may also like

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.'

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.

George Chapman All Fools (1605)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: George Bernard Shaw (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.