George Steiner: Trending quotes (page 3)

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

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 6 (p. 218).

Religion , Music

“Those who proclaim and apply to poetic works a "theory of criticism," a "theoretical hermeneutic" are, today, the masters of the academy and the exemplars in the high gossip of arts and letters. Indeed, they have clarioned "the triumph of the theoretical." They are, in truth, either deceiving themselves or purloining from the immense prestige and confidence of science and technology an instrument ontologically inapplicable to their own material. They would enclose water in a sieve.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 3 (p. 75).

Truth , Art , Confidence , Water

“The absolute scholar is in fact a rather uncanny being. He is instinct with Nietzsche's finding that to be interested in something, to be totally interested in it, is a libidinal thrust more powerful than love or hatred, more tenacious than faith or friendship — not infrequently, indeed, more compelling than personal life itself. Archimedes does not flee from his killers, he does not even turn his head to acknowledge their rush into his garden when he is immersed in the algebra of conic sections.”

George Steiner

"The Cleric of Treason".
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

Love , Life , Friendship , Faith

“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. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room.”

George Steiner

"To Civilize our Gentlemen" (1965).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

Death , Imagination , Cry

“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.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 3 (p. 9).

Life , Music , Learning , Heart

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

George Steiner

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Music

“Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.”

George Steiner

Fields of Force (1974)

“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.”

George Steiner

"A Season in Hell".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

“Often the children went alone, or held the hands of strangers. Sometimes parents saw them pass and did not dare call out their names. And they went, of course, not for anything they had done or said. But because their parents existed before them. The crime of being one's children.”

George Steiner

"A Kind of Survivor" (1965).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

Children , Parent

“There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.”

George Steiner

Quoted in The Daily Telegraph (London, 1989-05-23).

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

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 36).

Books

“We are still waging Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our very achievements turn against us, making politics more random and wars more bestial.”

George Steiner

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. I (p. 6).

War , World , Science

“The ordinary man casts a shadow. In a way we do not quite understand, the man of genius casts light. Instinctively, we flinch from this light. We assure ourselves that genius must pay a terrible price. Often history bears us out: the creator, the supreme artist, the master of politics carries the scars of his greatness.”

George Steiner

"Not a Preface, but a Word of Thanks," foreword to Unfinished Journey by Yehudi Menuhin (1977).

Way , History , Understanding , Light

“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.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 38).

Art , Music , Literature , Appearance

“For let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance.”

George Steiner

"The Hollow Miracle".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“As the glossaries lengthen, as the footnotes become more elementary and didactic, the poem, the epic, the drama, move out of balance on the actual page. As even the more rudimentary of mythological, religious or historical references, which form the grammar of Western literature, have to be elucidated, the lines of Spenser, of Pope, of Shelley or of Sweeney Among the Nightingales, blur away from immediacy. Where it is necessary to annotate every proper name and classical allusion in the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo in the garden at Belmont, or in Iachimo's stealthy rhetoric when he emerges in Imogen's bedchamber, these marvellous spontaneities of enacted feeling become "literary" and twice-removed.”

George Steiner

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Feeling , Literature

“The age of the book is almost gone.”

George Steiner

Quoted in The Daily Mail (London, 1988-06-27).

Books , Age

“Where God clings to our culture, to our routines of discourse, He is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech. So Nietzsche”

George Steiner

and many after him
Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City

God , Childhood

“Though acts of reception and of understanding are in some measure fictions of ordered intuition, myths of reason, this truth does not justify the denial of intentional conduct. It is as absurd to discard as mendacious, as anarchically opaque, the bearing of contextual probability and suggestion, as it is to invest in such probability any blind trust. The negations of post-structuralism and of certain varieties of deconstruction are precisely as dogmatic, as political as were the positivist equations of archival historicism. The "emptiness of meaning" postulate is no less a priori, no less a case of despotic reductionism than were, say, the axioms of economic and psycho-sociological causality in regard to the generation of meaning in literature and the arts in turn-of-the-century pragmatism and scientism.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 3 (pp. 174-175).

Truth , Art , Literature , Understanding

“Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.”

George Steiner

"K" (1963), introduction to The Trial by Franz Kafka
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

Life