All George Steiner Quotes
- The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. Configuration
- Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent. Accomplices
- To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human… Affair
- Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them… Hollow
- The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the… Accept
- Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who… Chess
- Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals. Amid
- We are still waging Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our very achievements turn against… Achievement
- When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page. Burn
- Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade. Criticism
- The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the… Critic
- If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of… Anger
- There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age… Age
- Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims… Blackmail
- When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation - albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware - of its… Albeit
- Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum… Beethoven
- A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen. Citizen
- 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… Afford
- All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be… Act
- What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee? Been
- 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 flattery… Academic
- Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of… Craftsman
- For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in. Been
- For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport… Art
- The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's The Devils no less than the art of Giotto or the Passions of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of… Art