« All Language Quotes · George Steiner's Page
Language Quotes by George Steiner
- 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…
- 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.
- Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
- Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
- 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…
- Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
- Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
- when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
- 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…
- 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…
More Language Quotes
- Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by… — Hannah Arendt
- High thoughts must have high language. — Aristophanes
- In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement… — Aristotle
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- War is what happens when language fails. — Margaret Atwood
- As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden
- A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically. — Diane Ackerman