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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
Religion
Faith
Afflicted
Hope
Infirmity
Every
Chronic
God
Indeed
Ought
Teacher
More quotes by George Steiner
My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.
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
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
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.
George Steiner
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
George Steiner
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
George Steiner
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner
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.
George Steiner
Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
George Steiner
Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.
George Steiner
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
A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
George Steiner
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
George Steiner
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
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
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
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
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
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
I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
George Steiner
