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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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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
Hope
Infirmity
Every
Chronic
God
Indeed
Ought
Teacher
Religion
Faith
Afflicted
More quotes by 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.
George Steiner
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
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
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
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
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
The age of the book is almost gone.
George Steiner
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
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.
George Steiner
The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision .. in Western poetry so much of the charged substance is previous poetry.
George Steiner
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
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.
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 intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
George Steiner
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
I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
George Steiner
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
He who has read Kafka's Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.
George Steiner
Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
George Steiner
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner
