George Steiner
Critic
1929-04-23
Quotes by George Steiner
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Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
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We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.
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when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
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Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
Read quote -
We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.
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when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
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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.
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To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
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It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease.
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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.
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The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
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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.
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I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.
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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.
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The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
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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.
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The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.
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The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
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It is no mere accident (as Orwell knew) that the standardization of sexual life, either through controlled license or compelled puritanism, should accompany totalitarian politics.
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