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George Steiner

George Steiner Quotes

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Famous George Steiner Quotes

“The externals of English are being acquired by speakers wholly alien to the historical fabric, to the inventory of felt moral, cultural existence embedded in the language. The landscapes of experience, the fields of idiomatic, symbolic, communal reference which give to the language its specific gravity, are distorted in transfer or lost altogether”

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Book:After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
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“«No se trata solo de que los vehículos convencionales de la civilización —las universidades, las artes, el mundo del libro— fueran incapaces de presentar resistencia apropiada a la brutalidad política; a veces se levantaron para acogerla y tributarle sus ceremonias y su apología. ¿Por qué? ¿Cuáles son los nexos, hasta ahora apenas conocidos, entre las pautas intelectuales, psicológicas, del alto saber literario y las tentaciones de lo inhumano.» Steiner, G. (2006) Lenguaje y silencio: Ensayos sobre la literatura, el lenguaje y lo inhumano. Sevilla: Editorial Gedisa (trabajo original publicado en New York, 1976), p. 12.”

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Book:Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman
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“Literature has chosen the domain of small scale personal relationships, and no longer deals with great metaphysical themes. We no longer have writers like Balzac and Zola, geniuses of human comedy who could explore every domain. Proust also created an inexhaustible world, and Joyce’s Ulysses is still very close to Homer . . . Joyce is the bridge between the two great worlds of classicism and chaos. In the past, philosophy could also claim to be universal. The entire world was open to the thought of a philosopher like Spinoza. Today an immense part of the universe is closed to us.”

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Author:George Steiner
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“As no generation of men can hope to complete the high edifice, as engineering skills are constantly growing, there is time to spare. More and more energies are diverted to the erection and embellishment of the workers’ housing. Fierce broils occur between different nations assembled on the site. ‘Added to which was the fact that already the second or third generation recognized the meaninglessness, the futility (die Sinnlosigkeit) of building a Tower unto Heaven—but all had become too involved with each other to quit the city.”

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Book:After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
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“No cabe duda de que el contraataque más exuberante lanzado por escritor alguno contra la reducción del lenguaje es el de James Joyce. Después de Shakespeare y de Burton, la literatura no había conocido semejante goloso de las palabras. Como si se hubiera dado cuenta de que la ciecnia había arrebatado al lenguaje muchas de sus antiguas posesiones, de sus colonias periféricas, Joyce quiso anexionarle una nuevo reino subterráneo. El Ulises pesca en su red luminosa la confusión viva de la vida inconsciente; Finnegan´s Wake destruye los bastiones del sueño, Joyce, como nadie había después de Milton, devuelve al oído inglés la vasta magnificiencia de su ancestro. Comanda grandes batallones de palabras, recluta nuevas palabras hace tiempo olvidadas u oxidadas, llama a filas otras palabras nuevas convocadas por las necesidades de la imaginación.”

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Author:George Steiner
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“We are, in the main, 'word-blind' to Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent verse. This blindness results from a major change in habits of sensibility. Our contemporary sense of the poetic, our often unexamined presumptions about valid or spurious uses of figurative speech have developed from a conscious negation of fin de siécle ideals.”

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Book:After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
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“Es un secreto a voces que los intelectuales de biblioteca y los hombres que se pasan la vida rodeados de palabras, de textos, pueden experimentar con especial intensidad las seducciones de las propuestas políticas violentas, particularmente cuando tal violencia no toca a su propia persona. En la sensibilidad y la visión del maestro carismático, del absolutista de la filosofía, puede haber más que un simple toque de sadismo vicario (La lección, de Ionesco, es una macabra parábola de esto).”

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Book:Heidegger
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“If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.”

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Book:Language and silence: essays on language, literature, and the inhuman
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“Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.”

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Author:George Steiner
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“All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.”

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Book:Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?
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“To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.”

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Book:Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?
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“What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.”

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Book:Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?
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“But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing or an inaccurate transcription of a fourteenth-century epigraph is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of such scission? How does the spirit mask itself?”

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Book:George Steiner: A Reader
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“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.”

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Author:George Steiner
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“Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien - the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive - tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.”

KnowsReasonDreamSongLanguageColdBeatsDrawsBonesBarsOpeningTunesNervesInfidelityHammersGod KnowsPenetrateUnattractiveTenureIrrevocableInfantileEnlisted
Book:Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?
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“When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?”

IfsLooksWould BeShapesShadowCriticsInsightArguingInchesRainbowHammersPoiseEunuchs
Book:Language and silence: essays on language, literature, and the inhuman
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“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.”

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Author:George Steiner
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