George Steiner Quotes

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Age Art Books Criticism Critics Culture Dreams

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

George Steiner

Understanding, World, Way

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

George Steiner

Silence, Borders, World

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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

Dream, Teacher, Adventure

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He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection.)

George Steiner

Book, Night, Men

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

George Steiner

Significance, Translate, Decipher

George Steiner (1998). “After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation”, p.12, Oxford Paperbacks

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

George Steiner

Language, Understatement

George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.153, Oxford University Press on Demand

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Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

George Steiner

Men, World, Language

George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.398, Oxford University Press on Demand

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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

Heart, Love Is, Expression

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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

Morning, Men, Play

Language and Silence preface (1967)

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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

Reality, Silence, Special

George Steiner (2010). “Language and Silence”, p.30, Faber & Faber

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

George Steiner

Men, Light, Shadow

"Not a Preface, but a Word of Thanks". Foreword to "Unfinished Journey" by Yehudi Menuhin, 1977.

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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

Art, Believe, Difficult Questions

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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

Innovation, Tragedy, World

"The Death of Tragedy". Book by George Steiner, 1961.

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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

Frustration, Ties, One Day

"George and his dragons". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. March 17, 2001.

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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

Self, Years, Six

George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.231, Oxford University Press on Demand

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

George Steiner

Book, Reading, Boredom

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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

Heart, Lines, Made

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Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien - the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive - tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.

George Steiner

Dream, Song, Infidelity

George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.210, Faber & Faber

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

George Steiner

God, Faith, Hope

George Steiner (2010). “No Passion Spent”, p.224, Faber & Faber

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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

Hate, Believe, People

Interview with D.J.R. Bruckner, www.nytimes.com. 1982.

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

George Steiner

Book, Reading, Hands

George Steiner (2010). “No Passion Spent”, p.11, Faber & Faber

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The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs from the predatory genius of the Greeks; no primitive peoples have ever come to study us. This is, on the one hand, a disinterested, intellectually inspired impulse. It is one of our glories. But it is, on the other, part and parcel of exploitation. [] The Western obsession with inquiry, with analysis, with the classification of all living forms, is itself a mode of subjugation, of psychological and technical mastery.

George Steiner

Spring, Unique, Men

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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.

George Steiner

Civilization, Christianity, Hoping For The Best

George Steiner (1974). “In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture”, p.45, Yale University Press

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Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.

George Steiner

Stars, Moon, Imagination

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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

Art, Criticism, Phrases

George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.11, Faber & Faber

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Born: April 23, 1929
Occupation: Literary critic
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