George Steiner: Trending quotes

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George Steiner: 148 quotes5 likes

“Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.”

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. VIII (p. 291).

“To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs — but a tribute nevertheless.”

"Marxism and the Literary Critic," Encounter, XI (November 1958).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“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.”

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 3 (p. 170).

“Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.”

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. VI (p. 228).

“To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.”

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 4 (pp. 190-191).

“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.”

"Literature and Post-History" (1965).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“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.”

"A Death of Kings"
Extraterritorial (1971)

“The new pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.”

"Night Words," Encounter (October 1965).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“Even where it is manipulated by major talents, deconstruction tends to bear either on marginal texts (Sade, Lautréamont), or on secondary work by a great writer (Barthes on Balzac's Sarrazine). The classics of deconstruction, in Jacques Derrida or Paul De Man, are "misreadings" not of literature but of philosophy; they address themselves to philosophical linguistics and the theory of language. The masks they seek to strip off are those worn by Plato, by Hegel, by Rousseau, by Nietszche or Saussure. Deconstruction has nothing to tell us of Aeschylus or Dante, of Shakespeare or Tolstoy.”

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 8 (p. 128).

“Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.”

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 1 (p. 53).

“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.”

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 4 (p. 11).

“What lies beyond man's word is eloquent of God. That is the joyously defeated recognition expressed in the poems of St. John of the Cross and of the mystic tradition.”

"Silence and the Poet" (1966).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“The really deep divergence between the humanistic and scientific sensibilities is one of temporality. Very nearly by definition, the scientist knows that tomorrow will be in advance of today. A twentieth-century schoolboy can manipulate mathematical and experimental concepts inaccessible to a Galileo or a Gauss. For a scientist the curve of the future is positive. Inevitably, the humanist looks back.”

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

“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past.”

"The Great Ennui".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)