Quote

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

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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
Book
Wall
Cycles
Canvases
Nothing
Hand
Walls
Munich
Great
Books
Guide
Butchers
World
Came
Guides
Beethoven
Next
Winter
Museum
Hands
Played
Cycle
Past
Door
Chamber
Strolled
Music
Doors
Museums
Reverently

More quotes by George Steiner

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I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
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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 intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
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The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
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Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.
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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
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The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's 'The Devils' no less than the art of Giotto or the 'Passions' of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.
George Steiner
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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
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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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The age of the book is almost gone.
George Steiner
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What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
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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
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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.
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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.
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