George Bernard Shaw, known simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, in Ireland’s capital, Dublin, as the youngest of three children. Being raised in genteel poverty, his interest in music, art and literature was developed due to his mother’s career as a professional singer.
Shaw suffered continuous frustration and poverty during his 20s and relied on his mothers tiny income she would receive from her husband (pound a week) and her earnings through music teaching.
Writing novel after novel, Shaw’s fiction continued to fail until the decade of the 1880s where Shaw ‘found himself’, becoming the force behind the Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group which would be the start of Shaw being heard.
George Bernard Shaw suffered a tragic death on November 02 1950 following complications from an injury he suffered days before. He was 94 years old.
We remember and celebrate George Bernard Shaw with some of his most famous quotes –
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything”
“A happy family is but an earlier heaven”
“Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time”
“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it”
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing”
“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance”
“If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance”
“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will”
“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable”
“There is no sincerer love than the love of food”
