George Steiner Quotes

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.

The age of the book is almost gone.

For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.

To many men ... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

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.

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.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.

What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.

Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.

If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.

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.

I'm sorry, I'm absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.

I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

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.

I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.

Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.

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.

The symmetries of immanence are cruel.

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.

To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals.

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

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.