George Steiner quotes

George Steiner was a French-born literary critic, essayist, and philosopher known for his deep engagement with literature, language, and culture. His insightful works explored the relationship between language, translation, and the human condition. He greatly influenced modern literary criticism and the philosophy of literature. Here are 100 of his quotes:

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness. (George Steiner)
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life. View quote
George Steiner
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. View quote
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. View quote
George Steiner
Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent. View quote
George Steiner
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. View quote
George Steiner
The age of the book is almost gone. View quote
George Steiner
Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade. View quote
George Steiner
The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. View quote
George Steiner
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. View quote
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)
Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large. View quote
George Steiner
For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in. View quote
George Steiner
Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise. View quote
George Steiner
A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen. View quote
George Steiner
When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page. View quote
George Steiner
A sentence always means more. Even a single word, within the weave of incommensurable connotation, can, and usually does. View quote
George Steiner
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. View quote
George Steiner
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. View quote
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. View quote
George Steiner
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)
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. View quote
George Steiner
when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. View quote
George Steiner
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. View quote
George Steiner
Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow. View quote
George Steiner

George Steiner

George Steiner - Image
Photo: TheNexusInstitute (youtube), CC BY 3.0
Occupation: American Critic
Born: April 23, 1928
Died: February 3, 2020
Quotes count: 100
Wikipedia: George Steiner

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