George Steiner Quotes

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

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.

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.

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.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

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

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

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

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.