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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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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
Men
Grace
Writes
Hand
Poem
Lives
Exists
Given
Critics
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Criticism
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Writing
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Critic
More quotes by George Steiner
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
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
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
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
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
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
If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.
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
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
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
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
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 ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
George Steiner
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
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
The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
George Steiner
Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.
George Steiner
Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.
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
