Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s jab lands where Victorian self-help pieties go to die: experience doesn’t automatically improve you. The line is built like a trap for the complacent. Most people treat “I’ve been through a lot” as a résumé item, a moral credential. Shaw flips it. Wisdom isn’t a scrapbook of incidents; it’s the size and sensitivity of the instrument doing the receiving.

“Capacity for experience” is the key phrase, and it’s doing double duty. On the surface, it means openness: the ability to actually register what happens instead of sliding through life on preloaded scripts. Underneath, it’s a critique of social armor. Class, convention, and ego don’t just limit what you do; they limit what you’re allowed to feel and admit. You can have “experience” in the sense of events, travel, even hardship, and still be emotionally illiterate - protected by cliché, pride, or ideology. Shaw’s characters are full of that kind of “experienced” person: worldly, confident, and catastrophically unteachable.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in a culture obsessed with respectability and “character,” where age and suffering were routinely romanticized as proof of depth. As a dramatist and contrarian, he understood that people often go through events the way a tourist goes through a museum: they look, they move on, they miss the point. Wisdom, for Shaw, is not time served. It’s perceptual range - the willingness to be changed, to let reality revise you rather than flatter you.