Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s complaint isn’t homesickness in reverse; it’s a refusal to let travel be anesthetized. “Feeling at home” abroad is usually sold as the ideal: the hotel that anticipates your tastes, the city curated into familiar comforts, the soft imperial fantasy that the world is essentially your living room with better weather. Shaw flips that into a provocation. If you can glide through foreign streets without friction, you’re not encountering another place so much as exporting yourself into it.

The line carries Shaw’s trademark suspicion of coziness. Comfort, for him, is rarely innocent; it’s a moral solvent. To “feel at home” is to stop noticing, to stop asking why a society is arranged the way it is, to stop being challenged by difference. Shaw, the dramatist of arguments, wants the stage lit harshly enough to show the seams. Abroad should sharpen perception, not dull it with amenities and instant belonging.

There’s also a class and empire subtext humming beneath the wit. In Shaw’s era, a well-positioned British traveler could move through Europe with a kind of prepackaged legitimacy, surrounded by English-language service and social deference. Disliking that ease reads as a critique of the traveler’s privilege: if the world makes room for you everywhere, you may never learn how much room you routinely take.

The sentence works because it weaponizes an everyday aspiration. It sounds like a fussy personal preference, then reveals itself as an ethic: stay unsettled, stay alert, don’t let “abroad” become another version of home.