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. ”
― George Steiner

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The symmetries of immanence are cruel.”
― George Steiner

“Mentre [il lettore] legge, la sua esistenza si accorcia. La sua lettura è un anello nella catena di continuità nella rappresentazione del testo che sottoscrive la sopravvivenza del testo letto.”
― George Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1995

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

“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

“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