My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
“A canon is a guarded catalogue of that speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams.… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto… — 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… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
“We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when… — 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
