Pygmalion

by George Bernard Shaw

HIGGINS. [becoming excited as the idea grows on him] What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day. I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.

The hurricane is succeeded by a zephyr of amiable surprise.

Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves is as true of personal habits as of money.

LIZA. I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else. I wish you'd left me where you found me.

the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated.

HIGGINS. Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person's thumb are two different things.

The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out.

(for nobody ever faces unpleasant truths of this kind until the possibility of a way out dawns on them)

Age had not withered him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible.