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Quote by George Steiner

“There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.”

Quote by George Steiner

Book:George Steiner: A Reader

Work

George Steiner: A Reader

This book offers a diverse selection of George Steiner's writings, showcasing his intellectual breadth and depth across various disciplines including philosophy, literature, and cultural criticism. more

Author

George Steiner is an esteemed literary critic, born on April 23, 1929. His work spans a wide range of literary fields, including novels, poetry, drama, and philosophy. more

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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

“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.”

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“Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.”

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“A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.”

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“The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.”

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Book:Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?

Source: Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?

“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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Source: Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?

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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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“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.”

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“For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.”

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Book:Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?

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