What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard ShawRead
Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
Interpretation
Humanity's highest achievements exist only as ideals on paper, not in reality.
George Bernard Shaw reflects on the notion that many of humanity's greatest ideals—glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and love—are often only realized in theory rather than in practice. This quote suggests a critique of the discrepancy between our aspirations and the current state of reality, highlighting the difficulty of fully achieving these noble ideals in everyday life.
In practice
During a lecture about the human condition and our aspirations towards greatness.
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
I believe you make your day. You make your life. So much of it is all perception, and this is the form that I built for myself. I have to accept it and work within those compounds, and it's up to me.
The outer conditions of a person's life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state...Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are.
People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
The real cure to immigration, obviously, is to make sure that there is prosperity around the world so that people don't have the motive. Not just prosperity, but freedom.
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