Anyone loves George Bernard Shaw?
Here are some readings for all of you that do to spice up your day with brilliant sparkles of his words, hoping that we have the same taste, of course...
A Love Letter
February 27, 1913. To ‘Stella’ Beatrice Campbell
I want my rapscallionly fellow vagabond.
I want my dark lady. I want my angel -
I want my tempter.
I want my Freia with her apples.
I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour,
laughter, music, love, life and immortality ... I want
my inspiration, my folly, my happiness,
my divinity, my madness, my selfishness,
my final sanity and sanctification,
my transfiguration, my purification,
my light across the sea,
my palm across the desert,
my garden of lovely flowers,
my million nameless joys,
my day’s wage,
my night’s dream,
my darling and
my star...
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw's Famous Quotes
taken from:
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/George_Bernard_Shaw
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
England and America are two countries separated by a common language.
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a footrule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
- More quotations on: [Belief]
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
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.
You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"
"Back to Methuselah" (1921),
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
"Man and Superman" (1903),
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
"Misalliance"
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
"Mrs. Warren's Profession" (1893)
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
"The Apple Cart" (1930),
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essense of inhumanity.
"The Devil's Disciple" (1901),
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
Annajanska (1919)
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Candida (1898)
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
"Everybody's Political What's What?"
My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.
John Bull's Other Island (1907)
He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
Major Barbara (1907)
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
Man and Superman (1903)
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
Man and Superman (1903),
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
Man and Superman, Epistle Dedicatory
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898)
What is life but a seires of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.
Pygmalion
All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)
The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
The Philanderer (1898)
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.
"Mrs. Warren's Profession" (1893),
Short Biography of George Bernard Shaw
G. Bernard Shaw (he hated the "George" and never used it, either personally or professionally) was born in 1856 in Dublin, in a lower-middle class family of Scottish-Protestant ancestry. His father was a failed corn-merchant, with a drinking problem and a squint (which Oscar Wilde's father, a leading Dublin surgeon, tried unsuccessfully to correct); his mother was a professional singer, the sole disciple of Vandeleur Lee, a voice teacher claiming to have a unique and original approach to singing.
When Shaw was just short of his sixteenth birthday, his mother left her husband and son and moved with Vandeleur Lee to London, where the two set up a household, along with Shaw's older sister Lucy (who later became a successful music hall singer). Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, completing his schooling (which he hated passionately), and working as a clerk for an estate office (which he hated just as much as school).
It may not be a accidental, then, that Shaw's plays, including Misalliance, are filled with problematic parent-child relationships: with children who are brought up in isolation from their parents; with foundlings, orphans, and adopted heirs; and with parents who wrongly presume that they are entitled to their children's obedience and affection.
In 1876, Shaw left Dublin and his father and moved to London, moving in with his mother's menage. There he lived off of his mother and sister while pursuing a career in journalism and writing. The first medium he tried as a creative writer was prose, completing five novels (the first one appropriately titled Immaturity) before any of them were published. He read voraciously, in public libraries and in the British Museum reading room. And he became involved in progressive politics. Standing on soapboxes, at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park and at socialist rallies, he learned to overcome his stagefright and his stammer. And, to hold the attention of the crowd, he developed an energetic and aggressive speaking style that is evident in all of his writing.
With Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Shaw founded the Fabian Society, a socialist political organization dedicated to transforming Britain into a socialist state, not by revolution but by systematic progressive legislation, bolstered by persuasion and mass education. The Fabian society would later be instrumental in founding the London School of Economics and the Labour Party. Shaw lectured for the Fabian Society, and wrote pamphlets on the progressive arts, including The Perfect Wagnerite, an interpretation of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, and The Quintessence of Ibsenism, based on a series of lectures about the progressive Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. Meanwhile, as a journalist, Shaw worked as an art critic, then as a music critic (writing under the pseudonym "Corno di Bassetto"), and finally, from 1895 to 1898, as Theatre Critic for the Saturday Review, where his reviews appeared over the infamous initials "GBS."
In 1891, at the invitation of J.T. Grein, a merchant, theatre critic, and director of a progressive private new-play society, The Independent Theatre, Shaw wrote his first play, Widower's Houses. For the next twelve years, he wrote close to a dozen plays, though he generally failed to persuade the managers of the London Theatres to produce them. A few were produced abroad; one (Arms and the Man) was produced under the auspices of an experimental management; one (Mrs Warren's Profession) was censored by the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays (the civil servant who, from 1737 until 1967, was empowered with the prior censorship of all spoken drama in England); and several were presented in single performances by private societies.
In 1898, after a serious illness, Shaw resigned as theatre critic, and moved out of his mother's house (where he was still living) to marry Charlotte Payne-Townsend, an Irish woman of independent means. Their marriage (quite possibly sexually unconsummated) lasted until Charlotte's death in 1943.
In 1904, Harley Granville Barker, an actor, director and playwright twenty years younger than Shaw who had appeared in a private theatre society's production of Shaw's Candida, took over the management of the Court Theatre on Sloane Square in Chelsea (outside of the "Theatreland" of the fashionable West End) and set up it up as an experimental theatre specializing in new and progressive drama. Over the next three seasons, Barker produced ten plays by Shaw (with Barker officially listed as director, and with Shaw actually directing his own plays), and Shaw began writing new plays with Barker's management specifically in mind. Over the next ten years, all but one of Shaw's plays (Pygmalion in 1914) was produced either by Barker or by Barker's friends and colleagues in the other experimental theater managements around England. With royalties from his plays, Shaw, who had become financially independent on marrying, now became quite wealthy. Throughout the decade, he remained active in the Fabian Society, in city government (he served as vestryman for the London borough of St. Pancras), and on committees dedicated to ending dramatic censorship, and to establishing a subsidized National Theatre.
The outbreak of war in 1914 changed Shaw's life. For Shaw, the war represented the bankruptcy of the capitalist system, the last desperate gasps of the nineteenth-century empires, and a tragic waste of young lives, all under the guise of patriotism. He expressed his opinions in a series of newspaper articles under the title Common Sense About the War. These articles proved to be a disaster for Shaw's public stature: he was treated as an outcast in his adopted country, and there was even talk of his being tried for treason. His dramatic output ground to a halt, and he succeeded in writing only one major play during the war years, Heartbreak House, into which he projected his bitterness and despair about British politics and society.
After the war, Shaw found his dramatic voice again and rebuilt his reputation, first with a series of five plays about "creative evolution," Back to Methuselah, and then, in 1923, with Saint Joan. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Not needing the money, he donated the cash award towards an English edition of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, who had never been recognized with a Nobel prize by the Swedish Academy). Shaw's plays were regularly produced and revived in London. Several theatre companies in the United States began producing his plays, old and new, on a regular basis (most notably the Theatre Guild in New York, and the Hedgerow Theatre, in Rose Valley, PA, which became internationally known for its advocacy of the plays of Shaw and the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey). In the late 1920s, a Shaw festival was established in England (in a town, coincidentally, named Malvern).
Shaw lived the rest of his life as an international celebrity, travelling the world, continually involved in local and international politics. (He visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of Stalin; and he came briefly to the United States at the invitation of William Randolph Hearst, stepping on shore only twice, for a lecture at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and for lunch at Hearst's castle in San Simeon in California). And he continued to write thousands of letters and over a dozen more plays.
In 1950, Shaw fell off a ladder while trimming a tree on his property at Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire, outside of London, and died a few days later of complications from the injury, at age 94. He had been at work on yet another play (Why She Would Not). In his will, he left a large part of his estate to a project to revamp the English alphabet. (Only one volume was published with the new "Shaw Alphabet": a parallel text edition of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion). After that project failed, the estate was divided among the other beneficiaries in his will: the National Gallery of Ireland, the British Museum, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Royalties from Shaw's plays (and from the musical My Fair Lady, based on Shaw's Pygmalion) have helped to balance the budgets of these institutions ever since.
by Cary M. Mazer, University of Pennsylvania
Guest Dramaturg
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cmazer/mis1.html
Even shorter biography
George Bernard Shaw – Biography
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant. His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. After working in an estate agent's office for a while he moved to London as a young man (1876), where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. He began his literary career as a novelist; as a fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he decided to write plays in order to illustrate his criticism of the English stage. His earliest dramas were called appropriately Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Among these, Widower's Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession savagely attack social hypocrisy, while in plays such as Arms and the Man and The Man of Destiny the criticism is less fierce. Shaw's radical rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum of ideas, and nowhere more openly than in the famous discourses on the Life Force, «Don Juan in Hell», the third act of the dramatization of woman's love chase of man, Man and Superman (1903).
In the plays of his later period discussion sometimes drowns the drama, in Back to Methuselah (1921), although in the same period he worked on his masterpiece Saint Joan (1923), in which he rewrites the well-known story of the French maiden and extends it from the Middle Ages to the present.
Other important plays by Shaw are Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), a historical play filled with allusions to modern times, and Androcles and the Lion (1912), in which he exercised a kind of retrospective history and from modern movements drew deductions for the Christian era. In Major Barbara (1905), one of Shaw's most successful «discussion» plays, the audience's attention is held by the power of the witty argumentation that man can achieve aesthetic salvation only through political activity, not as an individual. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), facetiously classified as a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy the humour of which is directed at the medical profession. Candida (1898), with social attitudes toward sex relations as objects of his satire, and Pygmalion (1912), a witty study of phonetics as well as a clever treatment of middle-class morality and class distinction, proved some of Shaw's greatest successes on the stage. It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social corrective that gives Shaw's comedies their special flavour.
Shaw's complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950, the year of his death.
