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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.
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
Self
Precisely
Hour
Craftsman
Weakness
Projection
Whose
Minor
Move
Minors
Hours
Tactics
Moving
Originality
Often
Inherent
More quotes by 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
A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
George Steiner
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner
The age of the book is almost gone.
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
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.
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
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
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
The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision .. in Western poetry so much of the charged substance is previous poetry.
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 Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.
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
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
George Steiner
To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
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
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
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
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
