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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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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
Hand
Reading
Hands
Intellectualism
Human
Pencil
Humans
Pencils
Book
Intellectual
Simply
Quite
More quotes by George Steiner
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
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.
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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.
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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
To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs -- but a tribute nevertheless.
George Steiner
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
I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
George Steiner
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
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 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
Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
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
If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.
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
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
The age of the book is almost gone.
George Steiner
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
George Steiner
