The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
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. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
“But there is a third mode of trancendence: in it language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of… — George Steiner Copy Share
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life. — George Steiner Copy Share
Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an… — George Steiner Copy Share
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… — George Steiner Copy Share
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it… — George Steiner Copy Share
To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living… — George Steiner Copy Share
I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or… — George Steiner Copy Share
I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes… — George Steiner Copy Share
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… — George Steiner Copy Share
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. — George Steiner Copy Share
“The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations… — George Steiner Copy Share
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. — George Steiner Copy Share
The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering.… — George Steiner Copy Share
My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do. — George Steiner Copy Share
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence. — George Steiner Copy Share
