George Steiner > Quotes

“Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.”
― George Steiner

“when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. ”
― Steiner G

“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 others a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future; that is a threefold adventure like no other.”
― George Steiner, Lessons of the Masters

“We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can
play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the
morning.”
― George Steiner

“Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.”
― George Steiner, Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman

“The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.”
― George Steiner, Grammars of Creation

“Men and women sleep not with each other but with the memories, the regrets, the hopes of unions yet to come. Our adulteries are internal; they deepen our aloneness.”
― George Steiner

“A perceptive French critic has argued that in an age of deepening illiteracy, when even the educated have only a smattering of classical or theological knowledge, erudition is of itself a kind of fantasy, a surrealistic construct.”
― George Steiner

“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.”
― George Steiner

“It is not the literal past that rules us: it is images of the past.”
― George Steiner

“The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.”
― George Steiner, Real Presences

“We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.”
― George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life

“Un virus de insatisfacción vive en la esperanza.”
― George Steiner, Dix raisons (possibles) à la tristesse de pensée

“The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).”
― George Steiner, Real Presences

“Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or ‘un-say’ the world, to image and speak it otherwise. In that capacity in its biological and social evolution, may lie some of the clues to the question of the origins of human speech and the multiplicity of tongues. It is not, perhaps, ‘a theory of information’ that will serve us best in trying to clarify the nature of language, but a ‘theory of misinformation’.”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

“[...] after Spinoza, philosophers know that they are using language to clarify language, like cutters using diamonds to shape other diamonds. Language is seen no longer as a road to demonstrable truth, but as a spiral or gallery of mirrors bringing the intellect back to its point of departure.”
― George Steiner

“Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

“History is man-made, like this pair of shoes, though it pinches more.”
― George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.

“When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.”
― George Steiner

“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. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.”
― George Steiner

“Literature has chosen the domain of small scale personal relationships, and no longer deals with great metaphysical themes. We no longer have writers like Balzac and Zola, geniuses of human comedy who could explore every domain. Proust also created an inexhaustible world, and Joyce’s Ulysses is still very close to Homer . . . Joyce is the bridge between the two great worlds of classicism and chaos. In the past, philosophy could also claim to be universal. The entire world was open to the thought of a philosopher like Spinoza. Today an immense part of the universe is closed to us.”
― George Steiner

“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 only sense that matters.”
― George Steiner

“A canon is a guarded catalogue of that speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our homecomings. And this will include, if honestly arrived at and declared (even if solely to oneself), all manner of ephemera, trivial, and possibly mendacious matter…No manor woman need justify his personal anthology, his canonic welcomes. Love does not argue its necessities.”
― George Steiner, Real Presences

“What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough”
― George Steiner

“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, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.”
― George Steiner

“No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.”
― George Steiner, Real Presences

“There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.”
― George Steiner, Real Presences

“Como nunca antes, el estudiante y la persona
interesada por la literatura lee comentarios y críticas de libros más que los propios
libros, o antes de esforzarse por formarse un juicio personal.”
― George Steiner, Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman

“...there is in men and women a motivation stronger even than love or hatred or fear. It is that of being interested — in a body of knowledge, in a problem, in a hobby, in tomorrow’s news­paper.”
― George Steiner, George Steiner en The New Yorker

“Indeed, what could God be if His being could be circumscribed, let alone demonstrated by human dialectics and ratiocination?”
― George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life