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George Steiner Inspirational Quotes (47)

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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
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When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
George Steiner
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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
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I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.
George Steiner
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Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.
George Steiner
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To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
George Steiner
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If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.
George Steiner
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Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
George Steiner
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A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
George Steiner
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Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
George Steiner
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
George Steiner
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Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.
George Steiner
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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
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For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is grave and constant (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition.
George Steiner
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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
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The age of the book is almost gone.
George Steiner
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What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner
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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
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