George Steiner Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  George Steiner

  Silence, Borders, World

  34 Copy quote

• 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

  51 Copy quote

• 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

  38 Copy quote

• 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

  35 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  18 Copy quote

• 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)

  51 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  12 Copy quote

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

  George Steiner

  Book, Reading, Boredom

  22 Copy quote

• It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

  George Steiner

  Past, Mirrors, Other Cultures

  George Steiner (1974). “In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture”, p.3, Yale University Press

  3 Copy quote

• 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.

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  3 Copy quote

• 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

  3 Copy quote

• 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.

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  21 Copy quote

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