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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
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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
Intellectual
Performed
Age
Chess
Three
Pursuit
Music
Majors
Human
Major
Humans
Mathematics
Puberty
Aware
Pursuits
Beings
Feats
More quotes by 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
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
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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.
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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
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
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
George Steiner
A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
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
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
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
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
Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
George Steiner
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
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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
Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.
George Steiner
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
George Steiner
