99+ George Steiner Quotes on Books, Language and Lessons of the Masters - Quotes.pub

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Those who, in actual fact, generate the syllabus, who recognize, elucidate, and transmit the legacy of literacy in regard to textual, artistic, and musical creation, have always been, are a handful.

It is not the literal past that rules us: it is images of the past.

Too often, to speak is to “get it wrong.

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’.

If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease.

When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.

I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.

For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.

But there is a third mode of trancendence: in it language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of its being. The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night.

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.

Indeed, what could God be if His being could be circumscribed, let alone demonstrated by human dialectics and ratiocination?

What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?

The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.

We know 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.

Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.

Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

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 use of the relevant language.

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.

I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.

The age of the book is almost gone.

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.

I’m sorry, I’m absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.

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.

My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.

Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do.

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.

Bookishness, highest literacy, every technique of cultural propaganda and training not only can accompany bestiality and oppression and despotism but at certain points foster it.

History is man-made, like this pair of shoes, though it pinches more.

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.

More and more lower-middle-income families either live their lives in debt or leave the city altogether. The boom is strictly at the penthouse level.

Todo el mundo sabe lo que es un flechazo, el amor a primera vista; no hay forma de explicarlo. Sucede, no cabe duda de que sucede: una mirada, un gesto, en los que se decide toda una vida.

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.

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.

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.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

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.

Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals.

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.

What you don’t know by heart you haven’t really loved deeply enough.

To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the city of Isaiah.

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.

Fischer does not merely outplay opponents; he leaves them bodily and mentally glutted. Fisher himself speaks of the exultant instant in which he feels the ‘ego of the other player crumbling.’

When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch’s shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?

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.

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 readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

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