Masercot of the very funny humor blog Potatoes and The Promise of More Potatoes has tagged me to play the blog game “Quote Tag.” The way it works is this: a blogger nominates from three to six other bloggers; then each blogger has to name a 19th-century author and provide three to nine quotes from that author. In order to keep the game going, each blogger subsequently nominates three to six other bloggers.

I’m going to cheat a little by picking George Bernard Shaw as my choice of author.  His 94-year-old vegetarian life spanned across the 19th and 20th centuries—see that’s what happens when your diet is based on kale smoothies. The great thing about Shaw is that practically everything he ever wrote or said is quotable, so for lazy me, it’s an easy post.

So here we go:

1. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

2. “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.”

3. “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

4. “We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”

5. “My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.”

6. “Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!”

7. “In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”

8. “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”

And here are the names of  some bloggers for whom I’d like to pass the game onto (and whose blogs you may very well enjoy visiting):

Learn Fun Facts: Edmark Law’s daily blog of historical, mathematical, and lexical facts

Every Day Another Story: Homespun folk music and stories

McPhillamyActorBlog: Actor Colin Mcphillamy’s blog about his life in the theater