Back to Methuselah

Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw consists of a preface, "The Infidel Half Century", and a series of five plays: "In the Beginning: B.C. 4004", "The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas: Present Day", "The Thing Happens: A.D. 2170", "Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman: A.D. 3000", and "As Far as Thought Can Reach: A.D. 31,920".

Quotes

In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.
- Is There Any Hope In Education?

People will have their miracles, their stories, their heroes and heroines and saints and martyrs and divinities to exercise their gifts of affection, admiration, wonder, and worship, and their Judases and devils to enable them to be angry and yet feel that they do well to be angry. Every one of these legends is the common heritage of the human race; and there is only one inexorable condition attached to their healthy enjoyment, which is that no one shall believe them literally. The reading of stories and delighting in them made Don Quixote a gentleman: the believing them literally made him a madman who slew lambs instead of feeding them.
- A Touchstone For Dogma

I worship you, Eve. I must have something to worship. Something quite different to myself, like you. There must be something greater than the snake.
- Pt I: In the Beginning (The Serpent)

I hear you say "Why?" Always "Why?" You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
- Pt. I, Act I (The Serpent)
- This quote is sometimes misattributed to Robert F. Kennedy. It is often paraphrased slightly in a few different ways, including: "You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

Make me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that surely is a great and blessed invention.
- Pt. I, Act I

Everything is possible: everything. Listen. I am old. I am the old serpent, older than Adam, older than Eve. I remember Lilith, who came before Adam and Eve. I was her darling as I am yours. She was alone: there was no man with her. She saw death as you saw it when the fawn fell; and she knew then that she must find out how to renew herself and cast the skin like me. She had a mighty will: she strove and strove and willed and willed for more moons than there are leaves on all the trees of the garden. Her pangs were terrible: her groans drove sleep from Eden. She said it must never be again: that the burden of renewing life was past bearing: that it was too much for one. And when she cast the skin, lo! there was not one new Lilith but two: one like herself, the other like Adam. You were the one: Adam was the other.
- Pt. I, Act I (The Serpent)

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
- Pt. I, Act I (The Serpent)

Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.
- Pt. I, Act I (The Serpent)

Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.
- Pt. I, Act I (The Serpent)

I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.
- Pt. I, Act I (The Serpent)

The Serpent: The voice in the garden is your own voice.
Adam: It is; and it is not. It is something greater than me: I am only a part of it.
Eve: The Voice does not tell me not to kill you. Yet I do not want you to die before me. No voice is needed to make me feel that.
Adam [throwing his arm round her shoulder with an expression of anguish]: Oh no: that is plain without any voice. There is something that holds us together, something that has no word —
The Serpent: Love. Love. Love.
Adam: That is too short a word for so long a thing.
- Pt. I, Act I

I make no vows. I take my chance. ... It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.
- Pt. I, Act I (The Serpent)

You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.
- Pt. I, Act II (Eve to Cain)

Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow.
- Pt. I, Act II (Eve to Cain)

Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.
- Pt. II: The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas (Franklyn)

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes illness worth while.
- Pt. II

There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.
- Pt. III: The Thing Happens (Confucius)

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
- Pt. V: As Far as Thought Can Reach [1]

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
- Pt. V

The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.
- Pt. V

Life is not meant to be easy, my child but take courage: it can be delightful.
- Pt. V; cf. Malcolm Fraser, "life wasn't meant to be easy"

The He-Ancient: When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth
Strephon: Yes; and take all the fun out of it.
- Pt. V

Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls.
- Pt. V (The She-Ancient)

When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.
- Pt. V (The He-Ancient)

Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.
- Pt. V (Acis)

Even a vortex is a vortex in something. You can't have a whirlpool without water; and you can't have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.
- Pt. V (Acis)

The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.
- Pt. V (The She-Ancient)

I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough.
- Pt. V (The Serpent)

They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour of their destruction.
- Pt. V (Lilith)

I had patience with them for many ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: they embraced death, and said that eternal life was a fable. I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made...
- Pt. V (Lilith)

I say, let them dread, of all things, stagnation; for from the moment I, Lilith, lose hope and faith in them, they are doomed. In that hope and faith I have let them live for a moment; and in that moment I have spared them many times. But mightier creatures than they have killed hope and faith, and perished from the earth; and I may not spare them for ever. I am Lilith: I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy, Matter, to obey a living soul. But in enslaving Life's enemy I made him Life's master; for that is the end of all slavery; and now I shall see the slave set free and the enemy reconciled, the whirlpool become all life and no matter. And because these infants that call themselves ancients are reaching out towards that, I will have patience with them still; though I know well that when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me, and Lilith will be only a legend and a lay that has lost its meaning. Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.
- Pt. V (Lilith)

They have redeemed themselves from their vileness, and turned away from their sins. Best of all, they are still not satisfied: the impulse I gave them in that day when I sundered myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force.
- Pt. V (Lilith)

I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.
- Pt. V (Lilith)

External links

Encyclopedic article on Back to Methuselah on Wikipedia
Works related to Back to Methuselah on Wikisource