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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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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
Letters
Convention
Four
Brutality
Freedom
Cliche
Free
Hollow
Less
Conventions
Words
Letter
Nothing
Opposite
Opposites
Inert
More quotes by George Steiner
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
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner
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
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
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
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
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
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
The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
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
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
George Steiner
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
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
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
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
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
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 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
I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
George Steiner
The age of the book is almost gone.
George Steiner
