George Steiner Quotes

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

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen ma...

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

Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. An...

My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person ...

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. ...

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

What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.

I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.

We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks...

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it ...

the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powe...

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation...

The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multip...

The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'conden...

There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived ...

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and ...