Logos Multilingual Portal

Select Language



George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)  Shaw was born in Dublin of Protestant Irish stock. His mother was a talented amateur singer; his father was a corn trader. 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.
From 1879-1903, Shaw was a councillor for the London borough of St Pancras, getting practical experience of social problems in local government. All his life he remained interested in questions of social reform.
In 1884, he joined the Fabian Society where he met Sidney Webb and joined him in his attempt to make socialism respectable. Shaw became famous as a socialist agitator, speaking publicly (and for no fee) all over London, once or twice a week for the next 12 years.
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). 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. He wrote lengthy stage directions and character descriptions, more in the style of a novel than a play, as they were read - and admired - but deemed unsuitable for stage performance. Only in the Twenties they began to be accepted and appreciated by the public.
It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social corrective that gives Shaw's comedies their special flavour. 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. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Shaw accepted the honour but refused the money.
Shaw's complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950, the year of his death. He died at the age of 94, whilst pruning an apple tree.
".

나는 군인이 샐각 (사고)하기를 기대치 않는다
너 또한 바보가 아니라면, 진지해 진다는 것은 위험한 일이다
대부분의 사람들이 알고 싶어 하는 일들은 보통은 그들과는 아무 관계가 없는 것들이다
두 사람이 아주 폭력적이고, 아주 정신 이상적이고, 아주 망상적이고, 그리고 열정이 아주 변덕스럽다면, 그들은 죽음이 그들을 갈라 놓을 때 까지 계속그 흥분되고, 비정상적이고, 소모적인 상태에 머물겠다고 맹세할 필요가 있다
모두가 짐작하는 비밀보다 더 잘 지켜진 비밀은 없다.
민주주의는 우리가 당연히 받아야 할 방법으로 다스러져야 한다는 것을 보증하는 장치에 불과하다
민주주의란 부패한 소수가 지명하던 것을 부적격한 다수가 선출하는 선거로 바뀐 것이다
빈곤에 대한 공포가 당신의 삶을 지배하게 한다면, 당신이 얻는 것은 먹기는 하지만 삶을 사는 것은 아닌 것이 될 것이다
사람이 부끄러워하는 일이 많으면 많을쑤록 그는 더욱 더 존경스럽다
신앙인이 회의론자 보다 더 행복하다는 사실은, 술취한 사람이 술 안취한 사람보다 더 행복하다는 사실고 마찬가지로, 요점을 한참 벗어난 것이다
애국심이란 너가 그 땅에서 태어났기 때문에 그 나라가 다른 나라들 보다 우월하다고 믿는 너만의 확신이다
영국과 미국은 동일한 언어를 사용하는 두 개로 나누어져 있는 나라이다.
완벽한 연애는 오로지 우편으로 이루어지는 것이다
우리는 부의 생산없이 그 것을 소비할 권리가 없는 것과 마찬가지로 행복을 생산않고 그 것을 소모할 권리가 없다
자신의 모국어에 십분 능통치 못한 사람은 다른 언어에 통달할 수 없다
자유란 곧 책임을 의미한다.그리해서 많은 사람들은 이를 두려워 한다
정확한 통찰력을 갖지 못한 사람은 흔히 이를 냉소주의라고 말한다
타인에게 그들이 너에게 해야 된다고 너가 바라는 것 같이 행동하지 말라. 그들의 취향은 너와 같을 수가 없다
헤겔이 인간은 역사로부터 결코 아무 것도 배울 수 없다는 것을 우리가 역사로부터 배운다고 말했을 때 그는 아주 옳았다