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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

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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
Risk
Asks
Getting
Understanding
Wrong
Things
Constrain
Life
Larger
Questions

More quotes by George Steiner

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What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
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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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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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A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
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Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
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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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Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.
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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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There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
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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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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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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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If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.
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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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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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The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
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The age of the book is almost gone.
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To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
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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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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.
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