Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about George Steiner
George Steiner Quotes
87 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
What lies beyond man's word is eloquent of God. That is the joyously defeated recognition expressed in the poems of St. John of the Cross and of the mystic tradition. When the word of the poet ceases, a great light begins.
George Steiner
Source
Report...
We Jews walk closer to our children than other men... because to have children is possibly to condemn them.
George Steiner
Source
Report...
Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.
George Steiner
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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's rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.
George Steiner
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner
Source
Report...
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
George Steiner
Source
Report...
The private ownership of great art, its seclusion from the general view of men and women, let alone from that of interested amateurs and scholars, is a curious business. The literal disappearance of a Turner or a Van Gogh into some Middle Eastern or Latin-American bank vault to be kept as investment and collateral, the sardonic decision of a Greek shipping tycoon to put an incomparable El Greco on his yacht, where it hangs at persistent risk — these are phenomena that verge on vandalism.
George Steiner
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing or an inaccurate transcription of a fourteenth-century epigraph is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of such scission? How does the spirit mask itself?
George Steiner
Source
Report...
For let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance.
George Steiner
1
2
3
4
Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
George Steiner
Creative Commons
Born:
April 23, 1929
Died:
February 3, 2020
(aged 90)
Bio:
Francis George Steiner was a French-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator. He has written extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, and the impact of the Holocaust.
Known for:
After Babel (1975)
Real presences (1986)
The Idea of Europe: An Essay (2004)
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1960)
The death of tragedy (1961)
Most used words:
music
human
man
language
art
literature
life
private
criticism
poem
culture
spirit
dreams
genius
tragic
George Steiner on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
George Steiner Quotes
George Steiner Short Quotes
American Philosopher Quotes
Philosopher Quotes
20th-century Philosopher Quotes
Related People
Harold Bloom
American Critic
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes