George Steiner Quotes

77 quotes in 1401 categories

• It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era…
• 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. Rock…
• To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
• 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…
• The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.
• The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions,…
• 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.
• Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the…
• 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.…
• The age of the book is almost gone.
• The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
• Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.
• To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the…
• The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs from the predatory…
• He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of…
• The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
• There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
• Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
• The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction.…
• He who has read Kafka's Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the…

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