George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman, Pygmalionand Saint Joan. With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth26 July 1856
CityDublin, Ireland
CountryIreland
A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.
The test of good education is seeing how it behaves in a fight.
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
My reputation grows with every failure.
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.
You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
When a man wants to murder a tiger, it's called sport; when the tiger wants to murder him it's called ferocity.
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity