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There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

George Steiner

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George Steiner
Age: 90 †
Born: 1929
Born: April 23
Died: 2020
Died: February 3
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Neuilly
Francis George Steiner
Culture
Something
Inebriated
Gregariousness
Terribly
Noise
Wrong

More quotes by George Steiner

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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
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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.
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Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed the claims of the ideal. These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.
George Steiner
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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
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I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
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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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
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If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.
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The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
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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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
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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
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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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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
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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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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
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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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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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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