Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line is a trapdoor dressed up as a fortune cookie: it flatters our appetite for grand longing, then yanks it away. The first “tragedy” is the familiar romantic narrative of deprivation, the stuff of melodrama and motivational posters. Shaw grants it a quick, almost perfunctory nod, then turns the knife with the second tragedy: fulfillment. The wit lands because it violates the expected moral accounting where desire plus attainment equals happiness. In Shaw’s hands, wanting is not merely painful; getting is corrosive.

The subtext is an attack on the myths that keep Victorian (and, frankly, modern) society humming: that success redeems suffering, that romantic closure solves the mess, that the good life is a checklist. Shaw, a dramatist who specialized in puncturing self-satisfied pieties, frames desire as a machine that manufactures discontent. If you don’t get what you want, you’re miserable. If you do, you discover the want was either mis-specified, too small to hold your projections, or it comes bundled with new obligations, boredom, and the sudden disappearance of the chase that gave your life narrative shape.

The sentence works rhetorically because it’s symmetrical and merciless. Two options, both losses. It’s not nihilism so much as a corrective: the tragedy isn’t desire itself, but our insistence on treating it as destiny. Shaw’s cynicism doubles as a dare to outgrow the story that one perfect prize will finally make you whole.