Life & Mortality Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw takes the polite Victorian reverence for “taking care of yourself” and flips it into a dare. Health, in this line, isn’t a fragile heirloom to be kept pristine; it’s a fuel source. The provocation is deliberate: he strips away the moral glow we wrap around longevity and asks what, exactly, we think life is for if the main project is preserving the body that’s supposed to live it.

The intent is less self-help than anti-bourgeois sabotage. Shaw is mocking the middle-class obsession with safety, thrift, and “not overdoing it” - habits that masquerade as virtue while functioning as quiet surrender. “Even to the point of wearing it out” isn’t a literal prescription for reckless depletion; it’s a theatrical exaggeration meant to expose a cowardice that hides behind prudence. He’s arguing for use-value over hoard-value: the body as instrument, not museum piece.

“Do not outlive yourself” is the sharper blade. It suggests there’s a kind of survival that’s already a form of death: existing after your appetites, commitments, and risks have been negotiated down to comfort. Coming from a dramatist famous for needling complacency and puncturing sanctimony, the line reads like one of his characters speaking truth with a smirk. In an era enthralled by respectability and haunted by industrial fatigue, Shaw’s real target is not mortality but timidity - the slow, socially approved way people retire from their own lives while still breathing.