Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality. George Steiner More Quotes by George Steiner More Quotes From George Steiner Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate. George Steiner Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. George Steiner baffledprivilegebook 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 silencespecialreality The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. George Steiner oblivionmajoritybiographies 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 freedombrutalityopposites Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is. George Steiner languagemenworld Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement. George Steiner understatementlanguage 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 opponentsdoneage 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 hegelmenideas 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 linesmadeheart If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope. George Steiner hopefaithgod 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 usemenbelieve 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 essentialssecretneeds 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-bestchristianitycivilization My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do. George Steiner poetry-and-musicteachingfather A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen. George Steiner classical-musiccitizenstoday 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 citieswould-bemen 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 riskrealmoving 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 praxiscitiestrying
