To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist." - Meaning and context.">
The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate (1908)

To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.

— George Bernard Shaw

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist." in the context of "The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate (1908)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "George Bernard Shaw" (Quotes, 1900s) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
George Bernard Shaw

About George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist with a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory. He wrote more than sixty plays, including such works as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.