Pygmalion Quotes

“What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“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, Pygmalion

“I can't turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“HIGGINS
I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. 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.

PICKERING
At what, for example?

HIGGINS
Oh, Lord knows! I suppose the woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Get out of my way; for I won't stop for you.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“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, Pygmalion

“HIGGINS. 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, Pygmalion

“HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?
DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“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, Pygmalion

“She has mischievious moments when she wishes she could get him alone on a desert island...”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time. If there's anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: "You're undeserving; so you can't have it." Buy my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“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, Pygmalion

“You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“We are all savages”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“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 wont 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, Pygmalion

“Who asked him to make a gentleman of me? I was happy. I was free. I touched pretty nigh everybody for money when I wanted it, same as I touched you, Henry Higgins. Now I am worrited; tied neck and heels; and everybody touches me for money. It's a fine thing for you, says my solicitor. Is it? says I. You mean it's a good thing for you, I says. When I was a poor man and had a solicitor once when they found a pram in the dust cart, he got me off, and got shut of me and got me shut of him as quick as he could. Same with the doctors: used to shove me out of the hospital before I could hardly stand on my legs, and nothing to pay. Now they finds out that I'm not a healthy man and cant live unless they looks after me twice a day. In the house I'm not let do a hand's turn for myself: somebody else must do it and touch me for it. A year ago I hadn't a relative in the world except two or three that wouldn't speak to me. Now I've fifty, and not a decent week's wages among the lot of them. I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle class morality.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.
NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“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, Pygmalion

“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, Pygmalion

“HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?
MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge...”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins: you're tempting the girl. It’s not right. She should think of the future.
HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants – and not all of them – have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading it; and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“the beauty and nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion