Top 81 George Steiner Quotes
#1. The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.
George Steiner
#2. What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner
#3. Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
George Steiner
#4. To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the city of Isaiah.
George Steiner
#5. When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.
George Steiner
#7. Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.
George Steiner
#8. I'm sorry, I'm absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.
George Steiner
#9. Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.
George Steiner
#10. He who has read Kafka's Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.
George Steiner
#11. To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.
George Steiner
#12. Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge.
George Steiner
#13. Fischer does not merely outplay opponents; he leaves them bodily and mentally glutted. Fisher himself speaks of the exultant instant in which he feels the 'ego of the other player crumbling.'
George Steiner
#14. To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs
but a tribute nevertheless.
George Steiner
#15. There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
George Steiner
#16. A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
George Steiner
#17. The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.
George Steiner
#18. Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger.
George Steiner
#19. The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.
George Steiner
#20. Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.
George Steiner
#21. Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.
George Steiner
#22. Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.
George Steiner
#23. The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.
George Steiner
#24. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.
George Steiner
#25. The calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one's own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one's inward present their future; that is a threefold adventure like no other.
George Steiner
#26. If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.
George Steiner
#27. I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
George Steiner
#28. I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.
George Steiner
#29. Bookishness, highest literacy, every technique of cultural propaganda and training not only can accompany bestiality and oppression and despotism but at certain points foster it.
George Steiner
#30. The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's The Devils no less than the art of Giotto or the Passions of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.
George Steiner
#31. The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words.
George Steiner
#32. The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner
#33. Men and women sleep not with each other but with the memories, the regrets, the hopes of unions yet to come. Our adulteries are internal; they deepen our aloneness.
George Steiner
#34. Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
George Steiner
#35. Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
George Steiner
#36. A perceptive French critic has argued that in an age of deepening illiteracy, when even the educated have only a smattering of classical or theological knowledge, erudition is of itself a kind of fantasy, a surrealistic construct.
George Steiner
#38. Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
George Steiner
#39. The dramatic arises out of the margin of opaqueness between a writer and his personages, out of the potential for the unexpected. In the full dramatic character lurks the unforeseen possibility, the gift of disorder.
George Steiner
#40. My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.
George Steiner
#41. To many men ... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
George Steiner
#42. We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
George Steiner
#43. I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.
George Steiner
#44. I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.
George Steiner
#45. Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.
George Steiner
#46. More and more lower-middle-income families either live their lives in debt or leave the city altogether. The boom is strictly at the penthouse level.
George Steiner
#47. No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.
George Steiner
#48. The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
George Steiner
#49. When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.
George Steiner
#50. The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.
George Steiner
#51. Unlike Tolstoy, Dostoevsky was ardently persuaded of Christ's divinity, but that divinity moved his soul and solicited his intelligence most forcefully through its human aspect.
George Steiner
#52. Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.
George Steiner
#53. Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.
George Steiner
#54. There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.
George Steiner
#55. The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
George Steiner
#56. We are still waging Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our very achievements turn against us, making politics more random and wars more bestial.
George Steiner
#58. We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.
George Steiner
#59. The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.
George Steiner
#60. To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding
George Steiner
#61. The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
George Steiner
#62. Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
George Steiner
#63. The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).
George Steiner
#64. I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.
George Steiner
#65. Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals.
George Steiner
#66. For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.
George Steiner
#67. When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?
George Steiner
#68. All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.
George Steiner
#69. My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.
George Steiner
#70. I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.
George Steiner
#71. The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.
George Steiner
#72. It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease.
George Steiner
#73. If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.
George Steiner
#74. Functions of technical information, historic record, analytic argument, which are integral and obvious to Dante's use of verse are now almost completely a part of the 'prosaic'.
George Steiner
#75. To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.
George Steiner
#76. Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.
George Steiner
#77. When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
George Steiner
#78. For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is "grave and constant" (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition.
George Steiner
#79. Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.
George Steiner
#80. Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do.
George Steiner
#81. Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.
George Steiner
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