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
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)
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.
George Steiner— "K" (1963), introduction to The Trial by Franz Kafka
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"
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner— Ch. 6 (p. 36)
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)
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)
Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.
George Steiner— Ch. VI (p. 228)
Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.
George Steiner— Ch. VIII (p. 291)
The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.
George Steiner— Ch. VIII (p. 302)
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 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)
The new 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 over the roof-tops, making them hollow.
George Steiner— "Night Words," Encounter (October 1965)
It was a brilliant, mutinous period. Brecht gave back to German prose its Lutheran simplicity and Thomas Mann brought into his style the supple, luminous elegance of the classic and Mediterranean tradition. These years, 1920-33, were the anni mirabiles of the modern German spirit.
George Steiner— "The Hollow Miracle" (1959)
Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
George Steiner— "A Kind of Survivor"
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)
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner— "In a Post-Culture"
A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
George Steiner— "Tomorrow"
In the Soviet Union, he knew, great art hangs in public galleries. No scholars, no men and women waiting to mend their souls before a Raphael or a Matisse need wait, cap in hand at the mansion door.
George Steiner— "The Cleric of Treason"
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 by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.
George Steiner— Ch. 3 (p. 9)
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)
Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.
George Steiner— Ch. 1 (p. 53)
