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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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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
Devil
Bach
Existence
Devils
Passion
Passions
Less
Relations
Giotto
Woman
Gods
Dramatize
Art
King
Dostoevsky
Men
Relation
Inquire
Kings
Lear

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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.
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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?
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Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.
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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.
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Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.
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We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
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Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.
George Steiner
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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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The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.
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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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Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
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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.
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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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The age of the book is almost gone.
George Steiner