Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw rigs this line like a piece of stage machinery: it looks like an uplifting aphorism, but it’s also a provocation aimed at the complacent. The sentence marches in a clean three-step progression - imagine, will, create - turning “imagination” from a dreamy noun into the first lever in a production process. That’s pure Shaw: the dramatist who distrusted sentimentality but loved the idea that humans can be engineered, socially and morally, into something better.

The intent is less “be creative” than “take responsibility.” Shaw collapses the distance between private fantasy and public fact. Desire isn’t treated as a guilty pleasure; it’s raw material. The subtext is bracing: if you can’t build the life or society you claim to want, maybe you never truly willed it. Imagination becomes an ethical test, not an escape hatch. There’s also a sly rebuke to Victorian fatalism and the comforting story that history simply happens to us. For Shaw, history is written by people audacious enough to draft it in their heads first.

Context matters. Shaw’s career was steeped in arguments about reform - socialism, class hypocrisy, the marriage market, the performance of respectability. His plays expose how “reality” is often just consensus plus inertia. This quote smuggles in his larger project: treat the world as revisable. The rhetoric works because it flatters the reader’s agency while quietly demanding proof. Creation, in Shaw’s worldview, isn’t inspiration. It’s follow-through.