George Steiner Quotes

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

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

The age of the book is almost gone. — George Steiner

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

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

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral. — George Steiner

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

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

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

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

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent. — George Steiner

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