Legends stories - G. Bernard Shaw

Legends stories

G. BERNARD SHAW

(26/7/1856-2/11/1950)

G. Bernard Shaw is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature(1925) and an Oscar (1938)  for his work on the film 'Pygmalion'. He wrote sixty-three plays and his output as novelist, critic, pamphleteer, essayist and private correspondent was prodigious. He is known to have written more than 250000 letters.

An ardent socialist, he became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its social causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles, Shaw co-founded the London School of Economics.

Some of his popular writings include - Immaturity, The Irrational Knot, An Unsocial Socialist, Widowers' House, Androcles and the Lion.

• A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
• Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
• Few people think more than two or there times a year: I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
• The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.
• 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.
• The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.
• Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
• You see thing; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say , "Why not?"
• The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
• There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.
• A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.