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A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
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
Deals
Today
Music
Good
Opium
Classical
Citizen
Citizens
Deal
More quotes by 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
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
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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
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
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.
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
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
To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
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
Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.
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
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 age of the book is almost gone.
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
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
To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.
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 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
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
