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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The symmetries of immanence are cruel. —
George Steiner

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

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

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it. —
George Steiner

To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate. —
George Steiner

Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals. —
George Steiner

When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page. —
George Steiner

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

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