Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity George Steiner More Quotes by George Steiner More Quotes From George Steiner Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. George Steiner baffled privilege book 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 silence special reality The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. George Steiner oblivion majority biographies The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words. George Steiner freedom brutality opposites Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is. George Steiner language men world Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement. George Steiner understatement language Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge. George Steiner opponents done age Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars. George Steiner 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 hegel men ideas 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. George Steiner lines made heart If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope. George Steiner hope faith god 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. George Steiner use men believe 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 essentials secret needs 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 hoping-for-the-best christianity civilization My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do. George Steiner poetry-and-music teaching father A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen. George Steiner classical-music citizens today 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 cities would-be men 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. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity. George Steiner risk real moving 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. George Steiner praxis cities trying The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision .. in Western poetry so much of the charged substance is previous poetry. George Steiner track poetry clouds
