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George Steiner
72 quotes
“The ordinary man casts a shadow. In a way we do not quite understand, the man of genius casts light. Instinctively, we flinch from this light. We assure ourselves that genius must pay a terrible price. Often history bears us out: the creator, the supreme artist, the master of politics carries the scars of his greatness.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Not a Preface, but a Word of Thanks," foreword to Unfinished Journey by Yehudi Menuhin (1977).
“The age of the book is almost gone.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in The Daily Mail (London, 1988-06-27).
“There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We come after. 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. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
George Steiner (1929–2020) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Humane Literacy" (1963).
“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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2020) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Retreat from the Word," Kenyon Review (Spring 1961).
“What lies beyond man's word is eloquent of God. That is the joyously defeated recognition expressed in the poems of St. John of the Cross and of the mystic tradition.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Silence and the Poet" (1966).
“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 (1929–2020) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 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 (1929–2020) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 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 (1929–2020) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Hollow Miracle" (1959).
“For let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: K" (1963), introduction to The Trial by Franz Kafka
“Often the children went alone, or held the hands of strangers. Sometimes parents saw them pass and did not dare call out their names. And they went, of course, not for anything they had done or said. But because their parents existed before them. The crime of being one's children.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Kind of Survivor" (1965).
“Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2020) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Marxism and the Literary Critic," Encounter, XI (November 1958).
“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 (1929–2020) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Creation of absolutely the first rank — in philosophy, in music, in much of literature, in mathematics — continues to occur outside the American milieu. It is at once taken up and intelligently exploited, but the "motion of the spirit" has taken place elsewhere, amid the enervation of Europe, in the oppressive climate of Russia. There is, in a good deal of American intellectual, artistic production (recent paining may be a challenging exception) a characteristic near-greatness, a strength just below the best. Could it be that the United States is destined to be the "museum culture"?”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The really deep divergence between the humanistic and scientific sensibilities is one of temporality. Very nearly by definition, the scientist knows that tomorrow will be in advance of today. A twentieth-century schoolboy can manipulate mathematical and experimental concepts inaccessible to a Galileo or a Gauss. For a scientist the curve of the future is positive. Inevitably, the humanist looks back.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle, even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, on to realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control. And we shall do so with that desolate clairvoyance, so marvellously rendered in Bartok's music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing or an inaccurate transcription of a fourteenth-century epigraph is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of such scission? How does the spirit mask itself?”
George Steiner (1929–2020) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Cleric of Treason," The New Yorker (1980-12-08).
“The private ownership of great art, its seclusion from the general view of men and women, let alone from that of interested amateurs and scholars, is a curious business. The literal disappearance of a Turner or a Van Gogh into some Middle Eastern or Latin-American bank vault to be kept as investment and collateral, the sardonic decision of a Greek shipping tycoon to put an incomparable El Greco on his yacht, where it hangs at persistent risk — these are phenomena that verge on vandalism.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The absolute scholar is in fact a rather uncanny being. He is instinct with Nietzsche's finding that to be interested in something, to be totally interested in it, is a libidinal thrust more powerful than love or hatred, more tenacious than faith or friendship — not infrequently, indeed, more compelling than personal life itself. Archimedes does not flee from his killers, he does not even turn his head to acknowledge their rush into his garden when he is immersed in the algebra of conic sections.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We speak still of "sunrise" and "sunset." We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where God clings to our culture, to our routines of discourse, He is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech. So Nietzsche (and many after him).”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have laboured to exorcise or to conceal from themselves and their clients. This ontological, which is to say both primordial and essential axiom (or platitude) of ineradicable undecidability needs, none the less, to be closely argued.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who proclaim and apply to poetic works a "theory of criticism," a "theoretical hermeneutic" are, today, the masters of the academy and the exemplars in the high gossip of arts and letters. Indeed, they have clarioned "the triumph of the theoretical." They are, in truth, either deceiving themselves or purloining from the immense prestige and confidence of science and technology an instrument ontologically inapplicable to their own material. They would enclose water in a sieve.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source