Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw turns a compliment into a countdown. “Beauty is all very well at first sight” nods to the obvious, then immediately undercuts it with domestic trivia: three days in the house and the spell breaks. The joke lands because it drags “beauty” off its pedestal and drops it into the unglamorous rhythms of proximity - breakfast breath, ordinary conversation, the furniture you stop noticing. Shaw’s real target isn’t attractiveness; it’s the romantic ideology that treats it as a lasting form of value.

The line is built like a stage gag: set-up, pause, punch. “Who ever looks at it” is the barb. The “it” reduces beauty to an object, something owned, displayed, then ignored. “In the house” adds a quietly possessive note, hinting at marriage-market logic: beauty as a commodity you acquire, then acclimate to, like new wallpaper. Shaw is mocking how quickly desire becomes habit, and how quickly habit becomes indifference.

Context matters. As a dramatist and socialist-minded public contrarian, Shaw spent his career puncturing Victorian sentimentality - especially the myths that props up conventional marriage and class display. This line belongs to that campaign: it’s an argument against mistaking surface appeal for substance, and a warning that what seems “natural” (falling for beauty) is often social training. The cynicism is deliberate, but not nihilistic. Shaw implies a higher standard: if you want love, partnership, or even admiration to survive day four, it has to be built from something sturdier than the first glance.