Wit & Attitude Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line flatters you just enough to disarm you, then quietly pulls the rug out from under romance. By calling first love “only a little foolishness,” he refuses the culture’s preferred myth - that the first time is sacred, destiny-scented, the one pure feeling before life corrupts it. “Only a little” is the needle: it punctures melodrama without turning cynical. You can be silly, he concedes, but your silliness isn’t evidence of cosmic truth.

The heavier weight falls on “a lot of curiosity.” Shaw recasts first love as experiment, not revelation. That word smuggles in appetite, boredom, education, status-seeking - all the messy motives polite society tries to bleach out of young passion. Curiosity is also morally neutral. It doesn’t promise permanence. It doesn’t even promise goodness. It promises attention. That shift is classic Shaw: the dramatist who loved exposing the social machinery behind our “private” feelings, especially the way courtship doubles as training for class, gender roles, and respectable adulthood.

Context matters. Shaw wrote in an era when romance was being marketed as both personal salvation and social duty, with marriage as the respectable endpoint. His plays routinely mock that bargain, showing how “ideal” love often masks economics, vanity, or the desire to be seen. The line’s intent isn’t to sneer at young people; it’s to grant them an exit from the tyranny of their own first story. If first love is curiosity, then it can be intense without being prophetic - a beginning, not a verdict.