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.
He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923).
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1925 was awarded to George Bernard Shaw “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.”
If from this point we look back on Shaw’s best works, we find it easier in many places, beneath all his sportiveness and defiance, to discern something of the same idealism that has found expression in the heroic figure of Saint Joan.
His criticism of society and his perspective of its course of development may have appeared too nakedly logical, too hastily thought out, too unorganically simplified; but his struggle against traditional conceptions that rest on no solid basis and against traditional feelings that are either spurious or only half genuine, have borne witness to the loftiness of his aims.
Still more striking is his humanity; and the virtues to which he has paid homage in his unemotional way – spiritual freedom, honesty, courage, and clearness of thought – have had so very few stout champions in our times.
Presentation Speech | Nobel Prize Award ceremony 1926
George Bernard Shaw Quotes
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
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.
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.
Man and Superman
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
Back to Methuselah
Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
Back to Methuselah
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
You see things; you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’
Back to Methuselah
George Bernard Shaw Books & Previews
Pygmalion
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
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