All George Steiner Quotes
- What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt,… Absence
- Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement. Inspirational
- Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic. Body
- But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a… Afternoon
- Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything. Consequence
- Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have… Aesthetics
- Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or… Access
- Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert… Accelerando
- Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life. Atrocities
- Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence. Deal
- Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence. Bordering
- We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's… Auschwitz
- Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity Antidote
- the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in… Adventure
- when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. Dies
- My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice… Critics
- Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age… Age
- Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is… Act
- Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak… Able
- I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her… According
- I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to… Colourless
- I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward. Chairs
- I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the… Answer
- Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech… Annihilate
- It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could… Day