If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's The Devils no less than the art of Giotto or the Passions of Bach, inquire into, dramatize,… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
“There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries… — 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 Image
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
“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 Image
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
