Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw turns ambition into stagecraft: if life won’t hand you the right props, steal them from the wings and keep the scene moving. The line is often misread as inspirational boilerplate, but its bite is class-conscious and faintly accusatory. “Circumstances” isn’t just mood or luck; it’s the whole machinery of social permission - money, education, networks, the quiet assumption that you’re entitled to try. Shaw’s trick is to praise the go-getter while exposing how arbitrary “getting on” really is.

The phrasing works because it treats success as an action verb, not a moral reward. “Get up and look” is almost comic in its simplicity, like a stage direction: wake, hunt, hustle. Then comes the pivot: if you can’t find what you need, “make them.” That’s not merely entrepreneurial; it’s defiant, even slightly criminal-sounding. Shaw understood that progress often requires violating the script - bending norms, gaming institutions, inventing roles that didn’t exist for you yesterday.

Context matters: Shaw wrote as a Fabian socialist and a dramatist who spent his career skewering Victorian respectability and the myth that society is a fair exam. The quote flatters individual agency, but the subtext is a critique of the world that forces agency to become improvised survival. It’s an ethic of self-creation delivered with Shaw’s signature wink: if the system won’t accommodate talent, talent should remodel the system - and then take credit for the renovation.