Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Temptation, in Shaw's hands, is less a moral battlefield than a diagnostic tool. The line performs a neat inversion: instead of boasting willpower, it pretends to abolish the need for it. "I never resist" sounds like confession, then swivels into a self-flattering claim of superior judgment. The trick is that it smuggles virtue in wearing vice's clothing. If the "bad" things don't tempt him, either he's saintly, pathologically self-controlled, or simply redefining "bad for me" as "anything I don't already want". Shaw lets all three readings hover, which is why it lands.

The specific intent is to puncture Victorian piety and the theater of self-denial. Shaw's era loved moral posturing; his plays loved exposing it. By making temptation contingent on desire, he implies that ethics is often just taste dressed up as principle. People congratulate themselves for resisting what they never craved, then call it character. Shaw's speaker refuses that cheap halo by making the egoism explicit: my appetites are already aligned with my welfare. Convenient, isn't it?

Subtext: a critique of moral language as social performance. "Resisting temptation" is a public narrative; Shaw replaces it with a private calibration. It also slyly satirizes the way rationalists explain themselves: if something tempts me, it can't truly be bad, because I'm too sensible to want harm. That's not logic; it's vanity with a grin.

Context matters because Shaw was a provocateur by trade. As a dramatist and public debater, he weaponized paradox to make audiences catch themselves agreeing before they realized they'd been teased.