George Steiner Quotes - Page 3

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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

Risk, Understanding, Constrain

George Steiner (1980). “On difficulty, and other essays”

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But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing or an inaccurate transcription of a fourteenth-century epigraph is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of such scission? How does the spirit mask itself?

George Steiner

Morning, Men, Thinking

George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.191, Oxford University Press on Demand

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To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.

George Steiner

Art, Skills, Degrees

George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.43, Faber & Faber

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What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.

George Steiner

Home, Creativity, Men

George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.264, Faber & Faber

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

George Steiner

Book, Worthwhile, Committees

George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.41, Faber & Faber

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Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge.

George Steiner

Age, Done, Opponents

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Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.

George Steiner

Book, Baffled, Privilege

George Steiner, Laure Adler (2017). “A Long Saturday: Conversations”, p.61, University of Chicago Press

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Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have laboured to exorcise or to conceal from themselves and their clients. This ontological, which is to say both primordial and essential axiom (or platitude) of ineradicable undecidability needs, none the less, to be closely argued.

George Steiner

Secret, Essentials, Needs

"Real Presences". Book by George Steiner, 1986.

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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.

George Steiner

Moving, Self, Weakness

George Steiner (1991). “Real Presences”, p.170, University of Chicago Press

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The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's 'The Devils' no less than the art of Giotto or the 'Passions' of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.

George Steiner

Art, Kings, Passion

"Real Presences". Book by George Steiner, 1986.

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The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

George Steiner

Broken, Silence, Society

George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.432, Oxford University Press on Demand

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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.

George Steiner

Teacher, Careers, Age

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The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.

George Steiner

Heart, Musical, Clarity

George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.9, Faber & Faber

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The age of the book is almost gone.

George Steiner

Book, Reading, Age

The Daily Mail, June 27, 1988.

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

George Steiner

Criticism, Passionate, Honest

George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.165, Oxford University Press on Demand

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Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

George Steiner

Art, Reflection, Judgement

George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.12, Faber & Faber

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The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

George Steiner

Writing, Men, Hands

George Steiner (2010). “Language and Silence”, p.3, Faber & Faber

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

George Steiner

Citizens, Today, Classical Music

George Steiner (1974). “In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture”, p.121, Yale University Press

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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

Cities, Income, Debt

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If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.

George Steiner

Dream, Art, Laughter

George Steiner (1998). “Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman”, p.392, Yale University Press

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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

Art, Drama, Forever

George Steiner (1980). “The death of tragedy”, Oxford University Press, USA

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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.

George Steiner

Intellectual, Age, Three

George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.171, Oxford University Press on Demand

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When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?

George Steiner

Rainbow, Shadow, Would Be

George Steiner (1967). “Language and silence: essays on language, literature, and the inhuman”, Macmillan Pub Co

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

George Steiner

Pages, Citing, Classic

George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.159, Oxford University Press on Demand

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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.'

George Steiner

Player, Ego, Doe

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Born: April 23, 1929
Occupation: Literary critic
Cite this Page: Citation

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