"Pygmalion" by Bernard Shaw

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• "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"
• "Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day."
• "What is life but a series of inspired follies?"
• "the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated"
• "You see, we're all savages, more or less. We're supposed to be civilized and cultured—to know all about poetry and philosophy and art and science, and so on; but how many of us know even the meanings of these names?"
• "He is of the energetic, scientific type, heartily, even violently interested in everything that can be studied as a scientific subject, and careless about himself and other people, including their feelings."
• "His manner varies from genial bullying when he is in a good humor to stormy petulance when anything goes wrong; but he is so entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments."
• "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. 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?
• "some habits lie too deep to be changed."
• "I don't and won't trade in affection."
• "Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble."
• "you can't appreciate what you've got, you'd better get what you can appreciate"
• "Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth."
• "Five minutes ago you were like a millstone round my neck. Now you're a tower of strength: a consort battleship."
• "If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle"
• "women, like men, admire those that are stronger than themselves. But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person's thumb are two different things"
• "The man or woman who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other quality in a partner than strength."
• "Weak people want to marry strong people who do not frighten them too much"
• "They want too much for too little; and when the bargain is unreasonable beyond all bearing, the union becomes impossible"