What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard ShawRead
All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it's wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything!
Interpretation
What this quote means
Striving to improve the world can be counterproductive if approached with struggle and resistance.
George Bernard Shaw suggests that the relentless effort and struggle often associated with trying to make the world a better place may not lead to the desired outcomes. Instead, he emphasizes that understanding the right approaches is crucial, as struggle and striving may hinder rather than help progress.
Themes
StruggleImprovementWorldUnderstandingApproach
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about leadership approaches.
More from George Bernard Shaw
All quotes →Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
George Bernard ShawRead
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
George Bernard ShawRead
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?
George Bernard ShawRead
Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.
George Bernard ShawRead
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
George Bernard ShawRead
Similar quotes
At the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, go or no-go. We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: go, no-go, but also maybe, plus what the hell let's give it a try.
Lewis ThomasRead
When it works, anticipation is far more fulfilling than surprise, because we are reminded that a sunrise is precisely as magnificent as it is inevitable.
John GreenRead
As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
Oscar WildeRead
At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.
W. G. SebaldRead
That the Jews are connected with God in a special way and that God does not allow that bond to fail is entirely obvious. We wait for the instant in which Israel will say yes to Christ, but we know that it has a special mission in history now ... which is significant for the world.
Pope Benedict XviRead