George Steiner Quotes
1929 -
More George Steiner Quotes
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 affairs — but a tribute nevertheless.
George Steiner— "Marxism and the Literary Critic," Encounter, XI (November 1958)
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 politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.
George Steiner— Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 19
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 of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.
George Steiner— Real Presences, I: A Secondary City, Chapter 6 (1989, p. 38)
Where God's presence is no longer a tenable proposition and where his absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable.
George Steiner— 1989 Real Presences.
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
George Steiner— Ch. III (p. 104)
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 walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.
George Steiner— "In a Post-Culture"
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 it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.
George Steiner— Ch. 4 (p. 11)
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner— Ch. 6 (p. 36)
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 originality.
George Steiner— Ch. 3 (p. 170)
The age of the book is almost gone.
George Steiner— Quoted in The Daily Mail (London, 1988-06-27)
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
George Steiner— Quoted in The Daily Telegraph (London, 1989-05-23)
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 us, making politics more random and wars more bestial.
George Steiner— Ch. I (p. 6)
When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.
George Steiner— Ch. IX: (p. 314)
Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.
George Steiner— Ch. X (p. 351)
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 grace of other men's genius.
George Steiner— "Humane Literacy"
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— "The Retreat from the Word," Kenyon Review (Spring 1961)
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.
George Steiner— "To Civilize our Gentlemen" (1965)
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 are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.
George Steiner— "Literature and Post-History" (1965)
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 of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.
George Steiner— "A Death of Kings"
When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation — albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware — of its own best hopes.
George Steiner— "A Season in Hell"
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner— "In a Post-Culture"
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 inheritance and context to which they pertain.
George Steiner— Ch. 4 (p. 11)
The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
George Steiner— Ch. 6 (p. 27)
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. It is to immure him in emptiness.
George Steiner— Ch. 4 (pp. 190-191)
For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.
George Steiner— Ch. 6 (p. 218)
