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Quote by George Steiner

“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.”

Quote by George Steiner

Book:Language and Silence

Work

Language and Silence

This book delves into the intricate relationship between language and silence, examining how language shapes our understanding of the world and the challenges it presents in conveying meaning and emotion. 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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“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

Source: Language and silence: essays on language, literature, and the inhuman

“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.”

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Book:George Steiner: A Reader

Source: George Steiner: A Reader

“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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“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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Book:In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture

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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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Author:George Steiner

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

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Source: In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture

“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?

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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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“What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?”

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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?

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