George Steiner Short Quotes

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Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

George Steiner
Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.

George Steiner
To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

George Steiner
A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.

George Steiner
For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.

George Steiner
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.

George Steiner
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?

George Steiner
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

George Steiner
Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

George Steiner
A book can wait a thousand years unread until the right reader happens to come along.

George Steiner
To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

George Steiner
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

George Steiner
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

George Steiner
If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.

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
We Jews walk closer to our children than other men... because to have children is possibly to condemn them.

George Steiner
When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.

George Steiner
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
A sentence always means more. Even a single word, within the weave of incommensurable connotation, can, and usually does.

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 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
Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.

George Steiner
Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.

George Steiner
The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

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
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

George Steiner
To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.

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
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
The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

George Steiner