George Steiner Quotes
To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
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.
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
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.
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
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.
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.
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.
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
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.
If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.
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.
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.
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.
The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.
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.
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
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.
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.
When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation - albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware - of its own best hopes.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.
I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
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.
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.
The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.
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.
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'.
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.
When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.
To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding